Paromita Vohra: Rights versus copyrights

IllustrationRavi JadhavLast week archiveorg a nonprofit website found itself blocked in India by government order Among the many things stored on the site are public domain books copyright free music software video and so on It also saves millions of web pages as a record of the Internet so that if someone like a government alters information on a web page you can go to archiveorgs Internet Wayback Machine and find an earlier version of a web page Initiatives like this allow a space for people to access in other words what governments restrict and corporate markets often dont consider worth their whileInvestigation revealed the block resulted from an order acquired by producers of two films mdash Lipstick Under My Burkha and When Harry Met Sejal The order which sought to protect copyright interests of the films by preventing piracy preemptively sought to block anyone who could potentially upload material mdash even legally It wasnt intentional But it was uncaringOne must protect ones work and commerce is an important concern But this is an intriguing coincidence given how heavily both films mined anticensorhip language and freedom expression in promotions One might argue that Lipstick Under My Burkha especially owes its success in significant measure to the way it was able to mobilise anticensorship and feminist politics into marketing virality converting the viewing and liking of the film into a kind of progressive credQuestion of censorship are too easily subsumed by the idea of opposition and are easily presented as political while obscuring the commercial Pahlaj Nihalani was an easy enemy a gift of prejudiced quotable opposable dialogue that kept giving It becomes easy to define oneself as progressive in opposition to something like that without having to define the real contours of that progressive politics the larger contexts of freedom of expression one is invested in when asking others to be invested in our ownSimilarly piracy is an easy villain resulting in melodramatic breast beating from corporate producers without anyone querying what kind of copyright regime they promote mdash how it protects or doesnt creative and labour rights of artists or takes freely from the repository of common culture without giving anything for free or deepen and widen markets organically Nor does anyone query how the world of piracy and torrents has helped shape audiences as well as filmmakers who pursue a kind of worldcinema language under the somewhat disingenuous label indie filmMost interestingly those who position themselves against censorship when their work or a work they believe in is attacked are often quite willing to support and demand banning of another work which is regressive in their world view It is also rare to see these solidarities extend from more visible spaces like Bollywood towards lesser known worlds mdash say of a documentary filmmaker like Divya Bharati who was recently persecuted for her documentary Kakkoos or writers like Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar whose book The Adivasi Will Not Dance was banned by the Jharkhand government last week after a prolonged witchhuntThe question is if for all their clever mdash and contemptuous mdashtrolling of Mr Nihalani people remain so unthinkingly implicated in larger regimes of censorship will his going away create greater freedom of expression Or the shutting down of piracies lead to a richer creative landscape We know the answer in our heartsParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at wwwparodevipicturescom