Lawrence Liang
Encyclopedia
Lawrence Liang(Chinese
: 劳伦斯 梁) is an India
n Chinese
legal researcher and lawyer based in the city of Bangalore
, who is known for his legal campaigns on issues of public concern. He is a co founder of the Alternative Law Forum, and, as of 2006, has emerged as a spokesperson against the politics of "intellectual property
".
Liang's key areas of interest are law, popular culture and piracy. He has been working closely with Sarai
, New Delhi
on a joint research project Intellectual Property and the Knowledge/Culture Commons. Liang is a "keen follower of the open source movement
in software", Lawrence Liang has been working on ways of translating the open source ideas into the cultural domain. Segments of an interview with Liang commenting extensively on copyright and culture are featured in Steal This Film
(Two).
Liang is author of "Sex, laws and Videotape: The Public is watching" and "Guide to open content licenses" published by the Piet Zwart Institute (ISBN 90-72855-16-7) in 2004. The guide is also available online. He is currently working on a book on Law, Justice and Cinema.
The Alternative Law Forum, he says, also does some policy work, "for example with regard to an amendment to the (Indian) copyright act that basically tries to follow the DMCA (US Digital Millennium Copyright Act
) model."
It has critiqued and influenced the debate on changes in the Indian Copyright Act. " We were trying to oppose that, showing how such a law would be harmful for creative innovation
. Right now we are also supporting a campaign in pharmaceutical policies. But our focus is not so much on policy advocacy, because you cannot really defend the grey economy and be on policy bodies. With regard to government, we try to push for the open source
model, arguing that public money should go into public intellectual property," Liang said in the December 2004 interview to World-Information.org.
on a joint research project Intellectual Property and the Knowledge/Culture Commons.
In June 2006, Liang spoke at the Asia Commons event in Bangkok
, Thailand
. An icommons.org blog entry said: "Lawrence Liang spoke about the ‘cultural flows’ represented by the piracy
of films and music
in Asia
(Liang) and the need to move away from ‘knee-jerk media responses to piracy
’."
Liang has said that: "If you take the critical scholarship on intellectual property in India, there is an older generation that emerged in the context of biodiversity and traditional knowledge, which has a nationalist twist to it. It emerged from an older debate around western modernity versus tradition, western epistemology versus the indigenous context, etc. I would characterize that as the first generation."
, free software
and media
practices, and in collaboration with Sarai also wrote the license for OPUS, an online collaborative platform for artists and media practitioners. In 2004 he was a Research Fellow at Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam
."
Starting with a narrative of his interest in that subject, he writes: "When I was in law school, I had great aspirations of wanting to be a filmmaker, and an FTII-type (Film and TV Institute of India, a prominent school for film-making) friend told me the best place to start was to watch a lot of foreign films and documentaries. So I did that rather dutifully and spent many hours watching documentaries, when I should have been reading corporate law. My fondest memory of my placement in Mumbai
with a law firm was when we took off to the Tata Institute of Social Sciences
(TISS) and watched Anjali Monteiro and K P Jayashankar's film on the Yerawada prison in Pune
."
His reasons for suggesting a rethink of licensing policies among alternative and documental film-makers in India, in this Creative Commons
-licensed article, include:
Liang Contributes to Kafila
.
who subsequently pursued his Master's degree in Warwick
, England
on a Chevening Scholarship
.
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
: 劳伦斯 梁) is an India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n Chinese
Chinese people
The term Chinese people may refer to any of the following:*People with Han Chinese ethnicity ....
legal researcher and lawyer based in the city of Bangalore
Bangalore
Bengaluru , formerly called Bengaluru is the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka. Bangalore is nicknamed the Garden City and was once called a pensioner's paradise. Located on the Deccan Plateau in the south-eastern part of Karnataka, Bangalore is India's third most populous city and...
, who is known for his legal campaigns on issues of public concern. He is a co founder of the Alternative Law Forum, and, as of 2006, has emerged as a spokesperson against the politics of "intellectual property
Intellectual property
Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...
".
Liang's key areas of interest are law, popular culture and piracy. He has been working closely with Sarai
Sarai
-Places:*Saraj , an historic estate in Resen built by Ahmed Niyazi Bey*Bal-Sarai, a village in Amritsar District of Punjab, India*Sarai , the capital city of the Golden Horde*Saraj municipality, a municipality in Greater Skopje, Republic of Macedonia...
, New Delhi
New Delhi
New Delhi is the capital city of India. It serves as the centre of the Government of India and the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. New Delhi is situated within the metropolis of Delhi. It is one of the nine districts of Delhi Union Territory. The total area of the city is...
on a joint research project Intellectual Property and the Knowledge/Culture Commons. Liang is a "keen follower of the open source movement
Free software movement
The free software movement is a social and political movement with the goal of ensuring software users' four basic freedoms: the freedom to run their software, to study and change their software, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. The alternative terms "software libre", "open...
in software", Lawrence Liang has been working on ways of translating the open source ideas into the cultural domain. Segments of an interview with Liang commenting extensively on copyright and culture are featured in Steal This Film
Steal This Film
Steal This Film is a film series documenting the movement against intellectual property produced by The League of Noble Peers and released via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol....
(Two).
Liang is author of "Sex, laws and Videotape: The Public is watching" and "Guide to open content licenses" published by the Piet Zwart Institute (ISBN 90-72855-16-7) in 2004. The guide is also available online. He is currently working on a book on Law, Justice and Cinema.
Quotes
Liang has said: "In recent years copyright has moved away from being an esoteric and technical legal subject to one that affects musicians, designers, artists, students, authors, ordinary consumers, and more generally any one involved in any way in cultural production."Alternative Law Forum
In an interview, Liang described the Alternative Law Forum thus: "(The) Alternative Law Forum provides legal support for people marginalized on the basis of class, race, caste, gender, disability or sexuality. We provide services for people who often have no access to them. Our main work is to conduct research on issues of globalization, urban studies, gender, as well as intellectual property and public domain."The Alternative Law Forum, he says, also does some policy work, "for example with regard to an amendment to the (Indian) copyright act that basically tries to follow the DMCA (US Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization . It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to...
) model."
It has critiqued and influenced the debate on changes in the Indian Copyright Act. " We were trying to oppose that, showing how such a law would be harmful for creative innovation
Innovation
Innovation is the creation of better or more effective products, processes, technologies, or ideas that are accepted by markets, governments, and society...
. Right now we are also supporting a campaign in pharmaceutical policies. But our focus is not so much on policy advocacy, because you cannot really defend the grey economy and be on policy bodies. With regard to government, we try to push for the open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
model, arguing that public money should go into public intellectual property," Liang said in the December 2004 interview to World-Information.org.
Law, technology, culture, copyright
Another profile on the Piet Zwart Institute describes Lawrence Liang as someone whose "key areas of interest are law, technology and culture [and] the politics of copyright". Liang has been working with Sarai, New DelhiNew Delhi
New Delhi is the capital city of India. It serves as the centre of the Government of India and the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. New Delhi is situated within the metropolis of Delhi. It is one of the nine districts of Delhi Union Territory. The total area of the city is...
on a joint research project Intellectual Property and the Knowledge/Culture Commons.
In June 2006, Liang spoke at the Asia Commons event in Bangkok
Bangkok
Bangkok is the capital and largest urban area city in Thailand. It is known in Thai as Krung Thep Maha Nakhon or simply Krung Thep , meaning "city of angels." The full name of Bangkok is Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom...
, Thailand
Thailand
Thailand , officially the Kingdom of Thailand , formerly known as Siam , is a country located at the centre of the Indochina peninsula and Southeast Asia. It is bordered to the north by Burma and Laos, to the east by Laos and Cambodia, to the south by the Gulf of Thailand and Malaysia, and to the...
. An icommons.org blog entry said: "Lawrence Liang spoke about the ‘cultural flows’ represented by the piracy
Piracy
Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence at sea. The term can include acts committed on land, in the air, or in other major bodies of water or on a shore. It does not normally include crimes committed against persons traveling on the same vessel as the perpetrator...
of films and music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
in Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
(Liang) and the need to move away from ‘knee-jerk media responses to piracy
Piracy
Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence at sea. The term can include acts committed on land, in the air, or in other major bodies of water or on a shore. It does not normally include crimes committed against persons traveling on the same vessel as the perpetrator...
’."
Liang has said that: "If you take the critical scholarship on intellectual property in India, there is an older generation that emerged in the context of biodiversity and traditional knowledge, which has a nationalist twist to it. It emerged from an older debate around western modernity versus tradition, western epistemology versus the indigenous context, etc. I would characterize that as the first generation."
Open source ideas into the cultural domain
This profile also adds: "Lawrence (Liang) has been working on ways of translating the open source ideas into the cultural domain. He has written a number of articles on copyrightCopyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
, free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
and media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
practices, and in collaboration with Sarai also wrote the license for OPUS, an online collaborative platform for artists and media practitioners. In 2004 he was a Research Fellow at Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam
Rotterdam
Rotterdam is the second-largest city in the Netherlands and one of the largest ports in the world. Starting as a dam on the Rotte river, Rotterdam has grown into a major international commercial centre...
."
Shoot, Share and Create
In an article titled "Shoot, Share and Create", Liang argues strongly that it makes sense for "documentary and alternative filmmakers in India (to) start licensing their works under an open content license".Starting with a narrative of his interest in that subject, he writes: "When I was in law school, I had great aspirations of wanting to be a filmmaker, and an FTII-type (Film and TV Institute of India, a prominent school for film-making) friend told me the best place to start was to watch a lot of foreign films and documentaries. So I did that rather dutifully and spent many hours watching documentaries, when I should have been reading corporate law. My fondest memory of my placement in Mumbai
Mumbai
Mumbai , formerly known as Bombay in English, is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is the most populous city in India, and the fourth most populous city in the world, with a total metropolitan area population of approximately 20.5 million...
with a law firm was when we took off to the Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Tata Institute of Social Sciences is a social sciences institute based in Deonar, Mumbai, India.-History:TISS was established in 1936, as the Sir Dorabji Tata Graduate School of Social Work, the first school of social work in India. In 1944 the school was renamed to its current name...
(TISS) and watched Anjali Monteiro and K P Jayashankar's film on the Yerawada prison in Pune
Pune
Pune , is the eighth largest metropolis in India, the second largest in the state of Maharashtra after Mumbai, and the largest city in the Western Ghats. Once the centre of power of the Maratha Empire, it is situated 560 metres above sea level on the Deccan plateau at the confluence of the Mula ...
."
His reasons for suggesting a rethink of licensing policies among alternative and documental film-makers in India, in this Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
-licensed article, include:
- Distribution, a major headache now: One of the biggest problems faced by documentary filmmakers in India has been the question of circulation and distribution. This is an issue which has been discussed in a number of meetings as well as on electronic mailing-lists in cyberspace.
- If the work were available freely (again note this does not mean that you cannot charge for the documentary, but means that a person who has bought a copy may make a copy and distribute it to others), there would be far greater circulation of documentaries amongst other filmmakers, students, activists, scholars and general public.
- Filmmakers don’t live off royalty: More important is the fact that most documentary filmmakers do not live off royalty in any case. Their films are either commissioned or they earn some money from various prizes, invitations and the like.
- Another issue, of course, is to recognise the hundreds and thousands of influences and inspirations that have gone into our own films. We need to work beyond the assumed myths of copyright law, and develop alternative practices that recognise the multiplicity that goes into the making of a film.
Published work
Liang is the author of A Guide To Open Content Licences. This is described as a guide to how we can "share culture in a world where everything has a license". This short book(let)'s introduction says: "Scientists, writers, designers, artists, musicians and others are increasingly interested in making their work available in 'the public domain'. This booklet is an overview of the ways in which this has been done and a guide to the growing area of Open Content Licenses through which people design and safeguard access to their work." This book is available for free download from the internet.Liang Contributes to Kafila
Advisor/mentor
Liang was also group advisor/mentor of the 2006-07 International Policy Fellowship of the Open Society InstituteOpen Society Institute
The Open Society Institute , renamed in 2011 to Open Society Foundations, is a private operating and grantmaking foundation started by George Soros, aimed to shape public policy to promote democratic governance, human rights, and economic, legal, and social reform...
.
Background
According to a profile of Lawrence Liang on the site Alternative Law Forum website, he is a graduate from the National Law School of India UniversityNational Law School of India University
The National Law School of India University is the leading institution for undergraduate and graduate legal education in India. By popular estimates, the school consistently ranks as the most prestigious law school in India...
who subsequently pursued his Master's degree in Warwick
Warwick
Warwick is the county town of Warwickshire, England. The town lies upon the River Avon, south of Coventry and just west of Leamington Spa and Whitnash with which it is conjoined. As of the 2001 United Kingdom census, it had a population of 23,350...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
on a Chevening Scholarship
Chevening Scholarship
Chevening Scholarship is a prestigious and highly competitive scholarship scheme for international students who demonstrated leadership potential and a commitment to public service. The Chevening Scholarships are named after Chevening House in Kent, the official country residence of the Foreign...
.
External links
- Alternative Law Forum website
- Guide to Open Content Licences
- Copyright/Copyleft: Myths About Copyright by Lawrence Liang, et al.
- Shoot, share and create: Looking beyond copyright makes sense in film by Lawrence Liang
- Public Domain in India. An interview with Lawrence Liang
- The Other Information City by Lawrence Liang
- The Black and White (and Grey) of Copyright by Lawrence Liang