 The question today really is that how do we look at technology and culture and it's almost a similar kind of questions that comes up of how we look at technology and science. In fact, a lot of the scientists think of technology as something really that enables to do serious work, but that's really by itself not serious and I suspect a lot of the cultural creators of great works also have a similar relationship to technology. I think it's important, but it's really something that others should do while they consider the really serious stuff of making culture. Now I think technology has various implications for culture and as we go on we will try and look at all some of them and I think the most important part of it is also it creates a whole range of new questions that every time you have a technological advance of a certain kind and certainly we live in times where we do see such advances that it poses new questions of cutting across a set of issues. One of the main costs discussing here of course is simply of ownership that you have technology today which allows it to appear that we can create far more than we could in the past that everybody's talking about. At the same time we see that really a few very important companies if you will, multinational corporations if you will today control the ownership of what is being produced, its ability to reach people that is being controlled in different ways. You may think for instance that YouTube is really democratizing in a certain way, it is true it does, but at the same time YouTube also becomes the dominant channel tomorrow that how it works of art will reach us and therefore if we look at the ecosystem of culture today where a number of people survive on say a newspaper, a magazine, various other forms all of that tomorrow may be just Google, YouTube and Facebook, Google in fact owns YouTube today. So you have the situation that if we look at the ecosystem of culture which is television, which is magazines, which is various other things, radio, if we will all of that can tomorrow migrate almost entirely to the internet and it is possible that becomes a dominant channel of access and therefore if it does so then you have the situation that how do others then survive? If there's only one television channel called YouTube then how will others survive? Now maybe people say it's good, we don't really need others looking at some of the television programs, I also seem to know, I might think so but the question is that it really poses an issue vis-a-vis languages, countries, groups and so on. So this is an issue of ownership which technology creates. Then of course what is the content of culture? Content of culture for a lot of us would be culture of resistance. We write, we speak, we perform because you want to change society. That's the purpose with which a lot of people will say that's why they are in doing what they are but if ownership becomes then concentrate on a few hands then you might get the culture of conformity as a dominant mode and that is of course what we see today that you can protest on various things but provided that protest is understood to be within a certain bounds. Now that allows protest, it also makes protest confirming in a certain way but if you really challenge something more fundamental then you could be just wished out of the space, you don't get access to people, you don't get access to channels of communication, your stuff may not be printed in the newspapers and so on and so forth. So ownership of course also creates a problem of how do you really then have a culture of resistance which can change society fundamentally. So these are not some things which are new but the point is if you look at the power with which media is enlarging its sphere then all this become even more important that today if you look at the newspapers or you look at television channels you will have the same actors going to various studios saying the same thing. So you have this hundred channels supposedly providing a variety but the variety is restricted almost to saying the same thing even the controversies, the same controversies will be on the channel. So you have this homogeneity in spite of the fact that technology has supposedly created this entire heterogeneity of topics in space. Now my take on this, I am going to leave some of these issues to others, my take on this is that if I look at culture that there is the culture in terms of its content what it says. There is also culture as an artifact, it could be a book, it could be a CD and nowadays it could be just something you download as a file from the internet. So you have different kinds of artifacts which are there and I look at in a slightly narrower sense that if I look at not as its content for which there are much better speakers over here and I will look at culture as simply what happens when you produce these artifacts, when you reproduce the artifacts so and also if we really look at it also distribute this artifact. So you have this essentially this part of culture which is how do you produce them, how do you reproduce them and I think the reproduction has been the one which people have looked at the most. So this is what I was saying that we can look at technology in all this and how then it impinges on what we are creating. Now I am not going to go into this audience to talk about the mechanical reproduction, if we really look at mechanical reproduction it starts with probably the printing press that is probably the first major advance you see. Before that when you create a work an oral work if you will our epics are all that then every time you produce a copy it is really also trans creating an original work because every time you speak the same piece you might make changes to it. If somebody else speaks it as long as it is oral every time he or she speaks it it is also going to change. So there is really no difference at that stage to my mind of what is the original and the copy because that there is no reproduction in that sense every instance of the delivery of such a piece of work means changes to the work. So there are each instances are really also instances of creation. So was it Homer was it where are they as or where the really people it is really an open question and I am not even I am not sure it makes an enormous amount of sense to go into it but when you come to written work then you have when you get parchment when you get paperus people start writing then there is a copy there is an original and there is a copy but even every time there is a copy because it is being done by hand there are changes. So copying is therefore leading to changes I would not call it transmission loss because it is really could be adding it could be making it better could be making it worse could be just different. So you have the issue of then every copy of the book that is produced baby by a great thinker somebody else who comes into it inserts his or her own contributions to it because there is no concept at that time of really of authorship in this strong sense we see today and in fact putting your original work into somebody else's more well-known person in fact would help to promote that work and you are interested in promotion of your ideas and authorship in that sense was not so important. When you come to mechanical reproduction when you start printing press and that's obviously a huge change I also like the idea that the wine press is what really leads to the printing press you know I am not going to comment on that further but the point is when you start bringing different technologies together you have paper you have the ink that is there you have the type forms that are formed all this leads finally to the printing press and with the printing press of course the number of the production of books go really up one must also not forget that it's quite interesting technology which is inherently what we would see today as democratizing can also be very oppressive in the short term sense because the bible was the first book to be produced and not comment on that but the second book to be produced was what is known as the hammer of the witches and that was the second largest distributed book at that time and it was used in the inquisition to find out what the witches what the witches were doing and all of them confessed to what the hammer of the witches prescribed as what the witches do so the devil's semen was cold and so on and so forth and all of them confessed to what are the described as what the witches would do and this was the standard text of the inquisition so printing press actually did contribute in a large measure to the witch hunts that took place and essentially a number of women who are midwives and so on being persecuted and killed so it's not just like you know you have the textile machinery which comes in and you get immediately a slavery in united states because suddenly you need much more cotton so let's not look at technology which essentially is liberating what you might think is liberating democratizing also has this characteristic where it starts it's quite often manifest itself in its opposite before you see the larger potential that that that takes place now one thing that happens is of course mechanical reproduction that we are talking about it comes into tell with films with music with radio with television you of course expand the scope of mechanical reproduction enormously you have a master you have a copy and of course you can display it in radio you can show it in television and so on and you get what I would call as broadcasting for which actually print is the first one because you're printing books it's in some form broadcasting but of course television and radio are far more clear now the the part that I think is important today and that I think is that what you look at it is that you also today are looking with the internet where you have a different form of communication I'll come to that very quickly but what does printing really do as as I say as artifacts that you know how much how it transforms the production is that as it says here it monastery was the primary creator of books in those days of course it does get into Italy into more organized form later but it's it really could produce number of books it produces very few because it had to be each had to be transcribed behind a talk to describe about a year to write a book and you know reading abby one of the major leading producers of books in that in that stage in england took about in 80 years produced 300 books 300 copies really when you come to printing press of course you have a huge quantum jump that takes place 9 million in 50 years so you can see the quality quantity increasing but it's also important what happens to cost now if you really look at the monastic mode of production which is the reading abby for instance so one person produces four books in this one book in a year when you go to the manufacturing mode you get all the scribes together you put them one person does the ruling one person does the illustration somebody does the writing then you get about a four books per person that's what you get in a year and therefore the books were very expensive apart the fact that you use vellum and so on but also the sheer labor that went into it make them very expensive so enough roughly a book would cost about 1500 pounds in today's terms if you look at the cost of a book at that time and therefore very few people could afford it so literacy was not important because you're not likely to have that kind of money in fact in many earlier time medieval times the books were counted as a part of the pillage if you where you robbed you went and robbed somebody some kingdom then when you toted up all the things that you had robbed among the things books would be counted as something very valuable and they'd be entered as also part of the booty so of course then we come to the issue of the property what happens when you have this technological revolution which creates a mass market of course then you get a concept of authorship ownership all these issues come up who owns the book by the way the printing the publishing or the printing industry originally claimed they held the rights to all the all the author in fact the copyright was giving the author back the right and in fact when it gave this right for 14 years the printers went again and said well after 14 years it belongs to us because there were a guilt and they said all right to print is only to us with us so in fact copyright liberates it from the printer and gives it to the author the right to sell copies this doesn't mean authorship authorship is of course inalienable but the right to the right to reproduction the copyright the right to copy is that is what's been given away as a copyright and that becomes alienable it can then be sold and bought on the market and of course you have the publishing industry which comes liberates it give the author some rights but as of course as we know today really the publishing industry today decides who is the star and who is not and so on and so forth of course not that consumers don't have any role on this but certainly publishing industry also creates a whole range of new stars and what should or shouldn't be popular now you have of course the what is called the copyright extension the united states is now 95 years and this is really called called by a lot of people as a mickey mouse act whenever the copyright of mickey mouse disney expires or is about to expire the united states congress extends it from 70 years now it has become 95 years so that's why it's called it's also called the mickey mouse act in india which should be called the rabid not to go right because it was 50 years earlier because of bishu bharti and the bangal is believing that rogana should belong to bishu bharti for another 10 years they extended to 60 years and it they wanted again to extend it to 70 years at which type people said enough you know so that that is that is the history of the copyright in india so of course now the question comes up that okay we have this concept authorship which technology has demarcated as author and owner of the right to copy so you have this different forms that are now created now you have of course the issue of what we are confronting a software industry that software industry has created a concept of what is called the new public license i'll just take one minute for it it's basically what would be called a viral license that means if i my source code what i've written is open anybody can use it under the new public license but if you use it you can give it to anybody you want it is free you can give it to anybody you can modify it no issues but you have to give it under the same license that means if i give it to somebody he can't alienate it and say now it's become my private property so new public license is really a viral license in that sense that it infects everything and that's good because you would like software industry monopoly rights of the software industry to be taken out now i'm not going to go into this issue today because you know where why the software industry by and large is following the free and open source model today and why the industry is moving away from what is the call to the proprietary model but what is important it is this created this concept of different forms of license and copyright within the copyright framework itself and Lawrence of course is a very important part of that which is called the creative commons license which gives a different kinds of rights to cops some authors may say you could take my work and modify it i know that most authors will not like that they're very jealous they don't want their authorship to be this destroyed in this particular way but they say if you want to use it for non-commercial purposes please go ahead and do it it's free if you want to change it acknowledge that you have changed this is the original this is change your bed so there are different levels of creative commons licenses which started from the new public license but also accepted that unlike software where authorship really nobody cares about bill gates didn't write any code that i know of which is important but authorship is not important but ownership was in the case of creative work authorship is important and therefore creative commons take to care of that to create different forms of ownership if you will of the copyright and what you could do with it and what you could not so maintain the content of authorship at the same time allow dissemination in a different way if you want and i would think for all those authors were sitting here whose books are no longer available might be a good way to say i'll take the rights back give it away as creative commons and put it on the net is a way of distributing at least people will get to read it otherwise we can't even read what i look might have written and now is no longer maybe copies are not available so now you see the difference of that technology today is creating is that you had a master from which you copy this is the mechanical production age today copies are made on your pc every time you download you use it you're really making a copy now what does this copying do is of course it's perfect copy that's advantage of a digital copy there is unlike mechanical production copies to copies had transmission of this does it it's as good as the original one that's advantage and that's why the problem that the music industry in the film industry claims because earlier any copy they could say was not as good as the original now it is and therefore they have the problem with copies now the problem that that is there is that if you take this copy as a user i if i have a book i can give it to my friend i can sell resell it and amazon you can buy used copy for instance but if i take a digital copy of what is with otherwise called at the drn the drn issue that is there now that what is called digital rights management by those who would like to restrict it and a lot of others will call it digital restriction management what it happens is when you give a digital copy of say a ebook which you buy on the net then it's restricted in different ways you can make that many number of copies for your own use you can't give it to somebody you cannot resell it so now we are getting into areas of also not only of authorship now we are also getting it what do we own when we own a copy so if i buy a copy of an ebook i buy a music which i download from the net i also now have different levels of restrictions put on me so i don't in the full sense own the copy which i did under laws which allowed a book or a music city to be given to me and then i own that copy i could give it to a friend i could lend it to somebody i could resell it i could take it back and give it to the shop and say hey this is i don't i don't like it i change it for something else all those things are now gone so you get into a situation where what is ownership in terms of the ownership of a copy is also not clear today and becomes a bone of contention now i would submit in all this what we are talking about is technology creates new issues it creates new issues in terms of legal rights it creates new legal forms and that is a terrain of struggle so when we as people who are talking about technologies of different kinds restrictions of different kinds are talking about is also connected intimately to the struggle of authors for their copyright authors to get reach their audience all of this must be seen together it's not just something which is a struggle of technology versus ownership it's not a struggle of authors versus publishers but it's a larger struggle of how really we have the digital potential of democratization of reaching knowledge to the people reaching creative things arts to the works to the people how we manage that that is a terrain of struggle today on which the technologies the consumers and the artists have to work together thank you