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ShareNew Delhi: According to a report, the world will have 2.2 billion internet users by 2013, but India's seventh stand on a global list topped by China is hardly encouraging -- over a billion people and slightly over 50 million net users.
Be that as it may, there's increasing interest in browsing and an imminent need to introduce internet in all fields, including schooling, governance, business and dispensation of justice. At the same time, an anti-cyber misuse law is also a must.
According to Business Software Alliance (BSA), a nonprofit trade association created to advance the goals of the software industry and its hardware partners, the approximate value of pirated software in Indian companies against which its members have together initiated 45-50 civil suits after January 2008 could be Rs85.78 crore.
The estimated damage could have been much higher had BSA considered independent suits being pursued by its member-companies against end-users.
As per a global software piracy study, India's piracy rate stood at a high 68% in 2008, causing a loss of $2.7 billion or Rs2,665 crore, apart from job losses to the domestic software industry. This, despite India showing a healthy decline of 6% in piracy over the past five years.
In 2006, then president APJ Abdul Kalam had forecast that by 2020, most Indians would be doing business on the web and warned that the nation needed to equip itself for the challenges internet might pose.
Law and justice will be totally different in the digital wo-rld, where crime may originate in a strange place even beyond our shores and damage organisational wealth in many locations. So, the urgency for an anti-cyber misuse law.
India woke up last month to amend the IT Act, making cyber terrorism punishable with life imprisonment. It also recognises offences such as identity theft on the internet, cyber stalking and cyber harassment. However, successful enforcement of any law depends on the sincerity and competence of the enforcement agencies. Do we have competent and sincere cops to arrest online thuggery?
