Half steps

The government has on the one hand opened up the country's media sector in two eminently sensible ways; first, it has allowed foreign institutional investors to invest in Indian media companies, and, second, it has allowed the facsimile editions of foreign papers.

Both are to be welcomed. It never made any sense to ban FIIs while allowing foreign direct investment in media companies; and equally, it is better to have foreign papers printed in India and subject to local laws, than to have them brought in at much greater cost to readers.

The restrictions on how they can do business in the country (i.e. no localising of either content or advertising""the latter as a protection measure for Indian publications) will presumably be eased as time goes by and people get used to the idea of international players.

The regret is that the government did not allow FII investment to be over and above the existing FDI limit of 26 per cent. Doing so would have cost nothing.

However, the ministry's attempt to regulate private broadcasters is on a different footing. If implemented, all foreign channels""even those that do not uplink from India""will not only have to register themselves with the ministry, together with details of ownership and broadcast objectives, but also turn this registered entity into the sole collector of advertising and subscription revenues from the Indian market.

While the ministry may be entitled to a basic record of broadcasters reaching Indian audiences, needling all down-linked channels for details on what they're showing could have no plausible purpose other than content regulation. The insistence that their business transactions stay strictly local is no better.

In a world of commerce moving towards global advertising aimed at broad satellite footprints across continents, this would be a distortion of the natural forces of globalisation.

India's mass audience for TV, however, is likely to be presented these control-drives wrapped in another guideline proposal""that any live broadcast deemed to be of national interest by the central government must be shared with the state broadcaster.

On this, the ministry has the judiciary on its side. Last year saw the Supreme Court (SC) directing Taj Sports to throw open the feed for what it thought it had secured as exclusive rights to the live telecast of the Indo-Pak cricket series. Cricket lovers cheered in jubilation.

But this is popularity at the cost of principle. Stop confusing the medium with the message, and it becomes apparent that this is a battle not for airwaves but for intellectual property. And on property, Jawaharlal Nehru made it quite clear to the Constituent Assembly that "there is no question of any expropriation without compensation".

Granted, the man was not without ambivalences on this issue, and even now some argue that software that can be duplicated cheaply ought to be free. Others argue that if something is of vast importance to everybody, it can no longer strictly be considered private.

All this misses the point that any intellectual product takes investment to produce, and protecting the property thus produced from being snatched away is a critical incentive for money to go into it in the first place.

Apart from hobbling intellectual output, such trampling of private property raises the risk perceptions of doing business in India.