Near miss!

I went out last night. Needed to get out of the hotel where I have been cooped up for the past few days. The Roundtable is in the Ballroom of the hotel where I am staying – the Seri Pacific Hotel in Kuala Lumpur.

I decided to take the Light Rail instead of a cab. Always a lot more fun to use public transportation when it is available. Walked to the terminal armed with my street map feeling like quite the adventurer. First stop was Times Square where the Borders Bookstore sign attracted my attention. I was going up the long escalator when a young child (must have been 3 years old) whose parents and uncle had decided to let him ride totally independently on the escalator (they were slightly ahead of him), tripped and fell.

We were almost three quarters of the way up and if I hadn’t blocked his fall and grabbed onto his legs, he would have gone all the way down. Of course by trying to block his fall, I nearly fell backwards. Dread what could have happened if I hadn’t been able to stabilize myself. As it is I am scared of heights. These bones would have taken quite a hit!

Anyway, all’s well that ends well. The young man bawled away but was not really hurt. All he lost was his ice-cream cone, half of which was all over my jeans. His wailing stopped when the cone was quickly replaced for him by his parents, who were very grateful for my intervention.

Intellectual Property and all that jazz

IP is being created within the Pakistan IT industry as more companies are developing products and there is an ever-increasing number of idea entrepreneurs who are making their mark on the technology scene. Hence when I was invited to attend the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Roundtable which focused on Software Copyright, I felt it was important for P@SHA to be represented here in Kuala Lumpur.

It was good to hear the different perspectives of delegates from the region as they spoke about their industries, the legislation, enforcement and growth. I was happy to see that there was also a focus on Open Source. Several delegates from Malaysia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia felt that Open Source was the only viable option for countries in this region as the price of international software was just not in line with the purchasing ability of the regional economies.

What surprised me most were the stories from the Japanese speaker who was from the Association of Copyright for Computer Software (ACCS):

1. Apparently the software developer who developed Winny (a Japanese peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program) – Isamu Kaneko, a research assistant in graduate course of computer engineering at the University of Tokyo in Japan – was arrested for suspected conspiracy to commit copyright violation by the High-tech Crime Taskforce of the Kyoto Prefectural Police. Kaneko originally anonymously announced his intent of developing the software on the Download Software board of the popular 2channel (2ch for short) Japanese bulletin board site.

Kaneko’s arrest caused an uproar in communities on the Internet citing it as an unjust arrest. A website set up to raise money for his defence raised over 11 million yen (about US$97,000) within two weeks. Kaneko was released on bail on June 1, 2004. More details on Wikipaedia.

2. The ACCS speaker also moaned and groaned about the sale of second hand computer games saying that it should be stopped because it impacts on the gaming industry and developers of games! I asked how this was different from the sale of second-hand books, clothes, bags, software, etc. Hadn’t there always been a separate market for second hand products? His answer surprised most of us. Apparently, because there is no degradation of computer games because they are on DVD unlike books which may have dog-eared pages and covers missing and clothes that are faded etc, computer games should be treated differently. The onward sale of the games by the first purchaser has negatively impacted the sales of the gaming industry in Japan by about one third. Amazing stuff!

More later!