Speaking Freely: Prasanth Sugathan
Deeplinks 2024-12-13
Summary:
Interviewer: David Greene
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.*
Prasanth Sugathan is Legal Director at Software Freedom Law Center, India. (SFLC.in). Prasanth is a lawyer with years of practice in the fields of technology law, intellectual property law, administrative law and constitutional law. He is an engineer turned lawyer and has worked closely with the Free Software community in India. He has appeared in many landmark cases before various Tribunals, High Courts and the Supreme Court of India. He has also deposed before Parliamentary Committees on issues related to the Information Technology Act and Net Neutrality.
David Greene: Why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself.
Sugathan: I am Prasanth Sugathan, I am the Legal Director at the Software Freedom Law Center, India. We are a nonprofit organization based out of New Delhi, started in the year 2010. So we’ve been working at this for 14 years now, working mostly in the area of protecting rights of citizens in the digital space in India. We do strategic litigation, policy work, trainings, and capacity building. Those are the areas that we work in.
Greene: What was your career path? How did you end up at SFLC?
That’s an interesting story. I am an engineer by training. Then I was interested in free software. I had a startup at one point and I did a law degree along with it. I got interested in free software and got into it full time. Because of this involvement with the free software community, the first time I think I got involved in something related to policy was when there was discussion around software patents. When the patent office came out with a patent manual and there was this discussion about how it could affect the free software community and startups. So that was one discussion I followed, I wrote about it, and one thing led to another and I was called to speak at a seminar in New Delhi. That’s where I met Eben and Mishi from the Software Freedom Law Center. That was before SFLC India was started, but then once Mishi started the organization I joined as a Counsel. It’s been a long relationship.
Greene: Just in a personal sense, what does freedom of expression mean to you?
Apart from being a fundamental right, as evident in all the human rights agreements we have, and in the Indian Constitution, freedom of expression is the most basic aspect for a democratic nation. I mean without free speech you can not have a proper exchange of ideas, which is most important for a democracy. For any citizen to speak what they feel, to communicate their ideas, I think that is most important. As of now the internet is a medium which allows you to do that. So there definitely should be minimum restrictions from the government and other agencies in relation to the free exchange of ideas on this medium.
Greene: Have you had any personal experiences with censorship that have sort of informed or influenced how you feel about free expression?
When SFLC.IN was started in 2010 our major idea was to support the free software community. But then how we got involved in the debates on free speech and privacy on the internet was when in 2011 there were the IT Rules were introduced by the government as a draft for discussion and finally notified. This was on regulation of intermediaries, these online platforms. This was secondary legislation based on the Information Technology Act (IT Act) in India, which is the parent law. So when these discussions happened we got involved in it and then one thing led to another. For example, there was a provision in the IT Act called Section 66-A which criminalized the sending of offensive messages through a computer or other communication devices. It was, ostensibly, introduced to protect women. And the irony was that two women were arrested under this law. That was the first arrest that happened, and it was a case of two women being arrested for the comments that they made about a leader who expired.
This got us working on trying to talk to parliamentarians, trying to talk to other people about how we could maybe change this law. So there were various instances of content being taken down and people being arrested, and it was always done under Section 66-A of the IT Act. We challenged the IT Rules before the Supreme Court. In a judgment in a 2015 case called Shreya Singhal v. Union of India the Supreme Court read down the rules r
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