Out in the "Open"

At the outset I feel the agreement proposed by ICC is very unfair. Though a lot of people would feel that the reason for Indian players not signing the contract would lie in personal gains; a thought needs to be spared for the team sponsor, which is given to the highest bidder to the BCCI. The contract to the team sponsor is a long term agreement of more than a couple of years. The then team sponsor, Sahara had bought all the commercial rights for a whopping Rs. 100 crores for the whole team which also comprised, “the exclusive use of the players to promote their corporate image as well.” So it is very unjust to bind the players by an agreement for endorsing the company specified by ICC for the period of the tournament as well as 30 days prior and after the tournament. Though the BCCI was compensated with an amount of Rs. 102 million out of the humongous amount of Rs. 550 million which ICC was getting for the purpose of being the title sponsor of the event, the players were getting a raw deal from the contract. This clearly portrays the power games that are played at the highest levels. But the players’ concerns being voiced by the then Indian skipper and Sachin Tendulkar turned the tide in favour of the players in the end.

Similarly taking cue from this incident, the software industry has a lot to learn in relation to open source coding, though being a very useful and efficient learning tool, becomes a very difficult sector to defend on IPR issues. Even though it can be claimed by companies that their training has developed the employees’ competence, they cannot say that it exclusively brought about the skills and thus claim stake in the product. Seeing from the organisation’s perspective, I wonder whether blocking of the softwares available on the public domain assisting in creation of products which can pose as direct competitors, would be a logical step to take. For example the faceoff between Recording Industry Association of America(RIIA) against Napster which is a company dealing in ASP,an Internet service that enables users to create their own private libraries of sound recordings.