Toon to Tango

05 December 2003
Mumbai: Animation has come a long, long way since the first public screening of animation with cinematic apparatus that used hand-painted sequences on celluloid strips. Today the global market is worth about $50 billion and is projected to become a $70-billion industry by 2007. Though global figures looks quite impressive, the share of the Indian animation market is a mere $0.6 billion, with just $20 million in export. It may be growing year on year, but is not going anywhere. The Indian animation sector is, at best, at the crossroads, while its better-off cousins — IT and business-process outsourcing services — are consolidating their scale, reach and focus, and continue to create ripples in the global market. The industry is beset with problems of size and scale, lack of global presence and marketing muscle, low margins, time and quality issues, low level of supply of quality animators, low entry barriers, and poor domestic demand to give the much-needed boost for such a fledgling market. Several companies of late have shut shop overnight, merged with parent/larger companies or scaled down, and most stuck in the sub-$1-million scale, even after a decade of being around. So while the world ''outsources'' more or less everything to India, has animation missed the bus? Clearly there are two types of companies today — the first category catering to the typical back-end ''outsourcing'', and thesecond having core competencies in original storytelling and indigenous character development for local market fare and co-productions. The former is by and large denominated by low-end or relatively low-value work catering to 2D animation. On an average it costs about $30,000-75,000 for an average episode produced in India as compared to $100,000-150,000 or so in the Philippines, Taiwan or Japan. A standard 22/24-minute episode if made in India costs 70% less compared to the production costs in the US; Disney, Sony, DreamWorks, Warner Bros and Pixar being some international firms that are quietly reaping the benefits of this cost-advantage. India does remain a preferred destination in spite of very strong competition from Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea and Mainland China. This despite the fact that these countries have been servicing the outsourcing needs of the West for over three decades, while Indian companies only entered the fray in the mid-90s. The Indian animation segment traditionally owes a lot to the advertising and TV fraternity where TV commercials and brands accepted character illustrations like The Amul Girl, Gattoo (the Asian Paints mascot), The Handiplast Boy, The Bata Bubble Gumme, 30-second ''animercials'' for brands like Hutch, Amaron, Orange, All-Out Mosquito Repellent, 7-Up, Kellogg''s, ICICI, Morten, Good-Night and Vicks. This proves that animation is now an acceptable medium to convey brand properties and values. The various mythological films and serials also spun off cartoon forms to educate the masses and complement efforts of organisations like UNESCO, UNICEF, Doordarshan and the ministry of health and family welfare to address social issues using the more benign cartoon and animation format to deliver a social message. Unfortunately the same agency fraternity has not been able to grow the market mainly because animation for them is still seen as a distinct post-production and visual effects process rather than as an integral component of the master production process, thereby making it prone to severe budget restrictions and low attention value. Ironically animation companies depend on these ''sponsors'' to give them steady work while at the same time make them prone to being squeezed for margins and back-breaking work in tough times. The plethora of interest groups like TASI, APAI, ASIFA-India and Nasscom, and concomitant duplication of efforts and a disjointed national image that is conveyed are not helping either. In the 2002 Annecy Festival in France, the Oscar and in Cannes, the South Koreans had organised their animation studios under one umbrella and stall. The studios were competitors to each other in their home country (like in India) but projected Korea as a major outsourcing hub (unlike in India). This ensured that Korea as a country had a better chance of grabbing business than any other individual entity working in isolation. The nascent Indian animation market must find ways to move up the value chain and get out of the current mindset by adopting a three-pronged strategy: 1. Original character development and storylines for the significant domestic and cross-cultural audiences 2. Moving on to 3D/digital graphics, flash-and-live action animation and taking on the resultant high-end outsourcing work available from US studios as they themselves quite clearly look to pare costs. This can be made possible by a distributed workflow model, which in turn has been made possible by common hardware, database systems, tools and off-the-shelf software suite, enabling artists scattered across the world to send in scene files and have them rendered into finished frames centrally. 3. International co-production, whilst an emerging option for sharing risks and resources, is not a particularly new idea. It is in an experimental stage even for the mature Indian film industry. What co-production and owning intellectual property rights does to companies is to leverage alternative revenue streams and footprints that come with the turf — terrestrial, video/CD releases, print, merchandising, licensing, first-run cable and theatrical rights. This will provide the necessary commercial environment for development of character, experimentation and even co-production. It is in these areas that tomorrow''s opportunities lie and where India can become the ''most preferred'' offshore facility for such type of high-end/high value work. These strategies quite clearly will put them on a path of achieving a critical mass that has eluded them so far — something which just 2D outsourcing will never be able to put it in the big league. There are companies in India that can ramp up and manage from 10 to 100 people in a month and to 1,000 in six months for the right kind and size of a project, but, alas, such projects continue to be the exception rather than the rule. Today, somehow, several TV channels have stepped in and provided the much-needed fillip to the struggling industry by running local animation fare. Even global and domestic brands like Asianet, ESPN-Star, Sony Max, Discovery, Nickelodeon and TNT Cartoon Channel have found ready acceptance of local animation fare among their respective target audiences (Tenali Ram, Hanuman, Pandava). Turner International''s Cartoon Channel is currently telecasting episodes of Adventures of Chota Birbal while a mainstream entertainment channel has commissioned Bheema Kheema, India''s first 52-episode series for children to be aired from mid-February 2004. In the US, the biggest market in the world, a recent partnership between IT giant IBM and independent producers for CG feature film production, economics of scale and size and workstation technology will radically alter the dynamics of the animation market yet again. And it is true that mega-size projects ($60 million-plus) and revenues determine who does what work where. It is no secret that Pixar''s (one of the few independent computer-animation companies) five animated full-length feature films have earned it more than $2 billion from worldwide box office. And sample this. The ''hit'' of tomorrow (Foodfight, produced by Larry Kasanoff, TDRL, involving 138 speaking ''main'' characters, 6,254 ''secondary'' characters, 174 sets that include 5,000 ''buildings'' and 12,000 lights) was ''filmed'' in the garages of Santa Monica and in the by-lanes of Taipei and Mumbai (and not in the backlots of Shanghai and Hollywood) at half the cost of a typical Pixar full-length CG feature film.

Get our IT Act Together

24.December.2004


Well intentioned cyber laws are only as good as their subsequent intrepretation and implementation.

The noise and colour of an Indian shaadi(wedding) brass band, more or less, describes the events of the last few days. That the law is an ass, in the case of Baazee.com, a 100 per cent Indian subsidiary of eBay - the world's largest online marketplace - is in some danger of being proven so. Except, in this case, the law is fairly robust; it is its interpretation and style of enforcement that is asinine!

Baazee was in the news recently on account of a rather profitable valuation and subsequent acquisition by eBay making its shareholders both happy and rich! Reportedly at $50 million for a subscriber base of just about 1 million registered users… the largest dotcom deal after the sale of IndiaWorld (Sify) to Satyam at the height of the internet boom No doubt an isolated case of an Indian dotcom success in today's post internet bubble world, but much needed success nonetheless. So what are the issues which have bought a fairly open and shut case to such prominence?

First, as everyone knows, an auction or marketplace site is much like a mandi, bazaar, stock exchange or flea market except that it has no physical boundaries. It is virtual and almost anybody in the world with an email id and internet access can participate by just registering and listing the product description of what they want to sell - not the product per se!

So in this case. It was not the 'objectionable' "DPS (Delhi Public School) clip" that was found on the site, contrary to what is reported in most media, but just an innocuous text description of the item.

Second, trading sites are fairly self-regulating. While anyone can register and transact, all buyers and sellers rate each other based on feedback on the reliability and trustworthiness of their transaction experience. The site, unlike the local kirana wallah (grocery shop-owner) neither 'owns', 'creates' or 'publishes' the product nor is necessarily aware of what passes through their site since there are literally millions of transactions taking place at any point of time. If one types the keyword "DPS Dhamaka" on the world's most famous search engine - Google, the results throw up links to sites actually containing the infamous clip! Baazee or Google, Inc as 'intermediaries' are in no practical position to pre-emptively control what is available on their sites nor act as moral gatekeepers. In short they have limited responsibility.

Third, a detailed mandatory user agreement between the user and the site further protects the service provider and defines what is not allowed to be listed (viz. objectionable material, pornography, weapons, drugs, etc,) and what indeed constitutes breach of this agreement and penalty for being in breach. This includes barring a subscriber from access and even being brought to the notice of the 'cyber crime division' of the local law enforcement agency.

Situations which could fall under a similar dilemma in the real world are where a newspaper editor or publisher cannot be quite held directly responsible, under existing legal jurisprudence, if their classified section carries fairly 'explicit' ads of massage parlours or escort and dating services.

Similarly in the digital or electronic world, if subscribers send objectionable text, voice or multimedia material over the net, mobile phone, telephone lines, Wifi- or Bluetooth-enabled devices then can the local telephone company, internet service provider or spectrum licensees be held directly responsible?

In such cases, the spirit and principle of section 79 of the IT Act ought to kick in and restrict the direct liability of the service provider (unless or otherwise clearly proven that the site or "intermediary" knew about it or did not exercise all due diligence to prevent the "offence").

Fourthly, in its currently strict interpretation of section 67 of the IT Act (electronic transmission and / or publication), the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), under the jurisdiction of which is the Palika Bazaar, the telecom company on whose network these MMS's were sent, and the director of IIT, Delhi where the images were found stored, stand implicated.

Had baazee failed to pull out the objectionable material, the police would have been perfectly right to enforce the law. Clearly, from all accounts baazee took of the offending listing within 48 hours of its listings and much before the law even got to know about it… mainly on being alerted by its online self-policing 'watchdog' feature.

Recently in the UK a member of the Queen's Household was dismissed from service for listing the Queens X'mas Gift to him - a $10 X'mas Pudding cake - up for auction on eBay! Needless to say, there was no question of anyone being hauled up from the site, let alone arrested. So what is the reason for the rather over-the-top reaction by all concerned here?

There has been a sudden spate of raids all over the country on cyber cafés, seizing of mobile phones, random checking of SMS / MMS of students, emails of actresses, etc, ever since. Unfortunately since the IT Act of 2000 has been passed there has been no sensational case which has come up and therefore, by all counts, this is a test case since there are only a few in the enforcement and legal fields who are familiar with the nature of the internet and modern communications technology and cyber laws which govern them.

It is obvious that however well intentioned the law, it is in the interpretation that there is going to be a veritable free-for-all till wiser counsel prevails!

Finally, the internet services "intermediary" community, as small as it is here, is largely underrepresented and fragmented with little or no spokes-person, body or special interest group to promote and protect its cause. To that extent the internet business in India though admittedly regarded as a child protégé, alas, is one which has been orphaned at birth. The little representation caters to motley interest groups and their limited charters and agendas. It is time for someone to step up to the plate.

Regulation of the internet will remain a Pandora's Box

The internet cannot be regulated the same way as newspapers, magazines, films, radio or television. By Probir Roy

02.February. 2005

IT Act I; scene 2 now unfolds after a very private act, which set off a very public storm. The Baazee school-sex MMS episode left an aftermath of a flurry of raids on cyber cafés, seizing of mobile phones, random checks of students'' mobile messages, scrutiny of an actress''s emails, and a generally heightened awareness of the threat of intrusion of hidden web cams and camera phones in people''s daily lives.

The government has moved quickly — it has set up a committee to suggest modifications in the five-year-old IT Act. This provides as good a time as any to take a step back and revisit the caveat-driven nature of the web.

First, the internet is the manifestation of humankind''s quest for limitless personalised two-way ''rich'' interaction with thought. At a point-and-a-click, the hypertext layout allows users to change topics on a whim, travel to distant places, gather world opinion or information on a subject in a matter of seconds, engage in digital trade and commerce and help in medicine and education. This nature of the internet must be protected and perhaps even promoted by any legislation that claims to be fair to this medium.

Legislation that seeks to concurrently regulate the internet must continue to recognise the unique and ubiquitous nature of the medium. The internet is not like the print medium, the communications infrastructure industry or the audio and visual entertainment industry. It is all, yet none of these! To paint it with the same law brush, tempting as it may be, or indeed even look for parallels in these sectors, is short-sighted. This has been proven in other parts of the world.

The interaction between ''receiving'' data and ''publishing'' it is where the core of the law and its interpretation should focus at this point. What is clear is that each side has its rights; the online publisher has freedom of expression and the receiver has the right to be secure from harm in his electronic space.

In a Baazee-like case, it is a tightrope walk — while direct publisher or distributor liability may not be clearly established, clever legal arguments and overseas rulings may not absolutelyexclude it either. A recent case in which an ordinary corporate website carried advertising on a subject matter in violation of the provisions of the pre-natal sex determination law, direct liability could be attributed to the company on account of inadequate due diligence having been exercised by it.

What of the proliferating web journal, Blogger-community, which has suddenly given power to anyone with an email id and a the ability to put down words on a screen to become both an electronic ''publisher'' and ''distributor''?

Provisions of law that attempt to give one side or the other an unreasonable burden in conducting its business are doomed to failure. Certain definitions and provisions of the Cyber Act 2000, in their current form are clearly limiting or burdensome. Anyone who has studied economics will endorse that the internet is a ''flow'' — an evolving medium in a 24x7 flux to find form, yet at loggerheads with it.

Laws on the other hand are ''stocks'' and lag behind, never able to anticipate those which they vainly attempt to govern. A good example are our ISPs, who had to rollback their VPN services launched in the late ''90s (which account for a dominant part of their revenues) on account of policy retrofitting done only in December 2004.

Over-enthusiastic or inadequate use and interpretation of sections 67 and 79 could have a bearing on direct responsibility and liability issues affecting evolving interactive service intermediaries such as web logs, search engines, newshopper, mobile value-added service providers and even mobile virtual network operators.

Notwithstanding the ambiguity of privacy laws in general in India — as applicable under Article 21 of the Constitution — is that cyber laws must not hint at censorship or impinge on the basic right of speech and expression. They may regulate the labelling on the ''packaging'', but never the content.

Till recently, major US mobile carriers offered adult content as a premium service, till they voluntarily withdrew it, even though US regulations preclude service providers from acting as content gatekeepers and censoring content in any way. And what of some news sites being subpoenaed to reveal their source of information! Clearly the same ''standards'' don''t seem to apply in the real world.

The foundation of the internet rests on the bedrock of technological innovation. Therefore, while technology is clearly the enabler, it is also keenly limiting and can impact current interpretations of due diligence. Talk about monitoring and regulating content on the net through the use of advanced technology and methods like filtering, labelling and rating, have been in vogue at various points of time. Given the varied technical nature of the protocols involved, it is likely that filtering tools will do very well with some of these, and extremely poorly with others.

For example, filtering software can easily block access to newsgroups with names like ''alt.sex''. However, no technology can identify the presence of sexually explicit images in a file that''s being transferred. Keyword-based blocking, as used by Baazee or by MSN''s blogger service (MSN Space), uses text searches to categorise data. If a posting or site contains objectionable words or phrases, it is blocked. Yet any internet buff knows that, at best, keyword searching is a crude and inflexible approach that is likely to block sites that should not be blocked while letting ''adult'' content pass through unblocked.

Searching and filtering has two key shortcomings: First, keyword searches cannot use contextual information. Searches can identify the presence of certain words in a text, but they cannot evaluate the context in which those words are used. For example, a search might find the word ''breast'' on a web page, but it cannot determine whether that word was used in amurgh masala recipe, an erotic story, or in an scientific piece on infant nutrition.

Second, keyword searches cannot interpret graphics. It is not currently possible to ''search'' the contents of a picture. Therefore, a page containing sexually explicit pictures will be blocked only if it is accompanied by text on the same page as the picture and the page contains one or more words from the list of words to be blocked. Ratings systems, on the other hand, imply making value judgements to categorise various types of content. Users are limited to choosing between a small number of ratings systems, each of which has its own biases and viewpoints.

The origin of the internet was found in defence programmes at DARPA in the ''60s. But its 21st century progeny in the avatars of ''darknets'' — anonymous service providers; underground P2P networks (which operate at the fuzzy edge of institutional acceptability) — and proliferating ''Blog services'' will have rule makers of any ilk scratching their heads long into the future. So, whether the wise men in recently constituted committees and groups really have the measure of key issues at hand or vice versa is something one hopes to track and keep readers of this column informed.