The SpicyIP TV Podcast SS Edn: Ep 09 with Dr. Kailash Nadh on Reimagining Copyright, Tech Sovereignty, Open Source, and Innovation
Sonisha Srinivasan
In the 9th episode of the SpicyIP Podcast Summer School Edition, it was a privilege to speak with Dr. Kailash Nadh, a major proponent of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in India, who many know as the CTO of Zerodha. It was a great learning experience for us as students to have him at the Summer School, where he took a session under the trees discussing Open Source software and technology sovereignty, nudging students to re-think IP in the context of Open Source Movement and AI.
It was fascinating to see his genuine passion for coding evident in his self-identification as a “hobbyist” software developer, despite heading the tech wing of one of India’s most profitable unicorns! Humility aside, the self-identification also seems to arise from his journey into coding as exciting and experimental, starting from when he was just 13 years old which continues till date. As he also goes on to explain, much of what he experienced on his journey is responsible for his thoughts on FOSS and open source. Don’t miss out some of the key takeaways which include his comments on the need to reimagine Copyright in an AI era that challenges its human-centric foundations, the true meaning of technology sovereignty being the ability to “self host”, run and maintain one’s software without external dependencies, the problems of software patents, as well as the four freedoms of FOSS. He points out that open source software stands on a legal foundation, and emphasises the inseparable character of law and technology with an increasing need for both lawyers and technologists to understand each other’s domain. Very relevant to the world where we are trying to improve actual innovation in the country, the discussion also went into the tenuous connection between patents (and quantitative metrics), vis-a-vis innovation.
Scroll down and and listen to the full podcast for more from him! (Earlier episodes include: 01 with Mr. Murali Neelakantan, 02 with Mr. Sandeep Rathod, 03 with Mr. Adarsh Ramanujan, 04 with Ms. Chetali Rao, 05 with Mr. KM Gopakumar ,06 with Ms. Zara Kaushik, 07 with Ms. Kruttika Vijay and 08 with Mr. Nikhil Narendran.)
SpicyIP TV: The Summer School Edition – Episode 09 Kailash Nadh on Reimagining Copyright, Technological Sovereignty and Role of lawyers in the Open Source Movement
You can view the Youtube video here: https://youtu.be/Y1xqQj5ZxIg?si=o-zK3Yj_QP4eN6s0
In this episode (09), Sonisha Srinivasan speaks to Dr. Kailash Nadh (bio below), CTO at Zerodha and a self-described ‘hobbyist’ software developer. A major FOSS supporter, he discusses his thoughts on re-imagining Copyright in the world of Artificial Intelligence(AI), the true meaning of technology sovereignty and methods to achieve it, as well as role of lawyers in the open source movement. He also shares his take on software patents and the relationship between patents and innovation.
About Dr. Kailash Nadh: Dr. Kailash Nadh has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence & Computational Linguistics from Middlesex University. He has been the CTO at Zerodha since 2013, where he co-founded its tech arm. Zerodha is now the largest stockbroker, and one of the largest fintech companies, in India. He has been a hobbyist software developer for close to two decades and writes code every day, building technology at Zerodha, and building and contributing to open source projects. He has co-founded FOSS United Foundation (2020), promoting open-source software in India; Rainmatter Foundation (2020), supporting ecological preservation and climate change initiatives; Indic Digital Archive Foundation (2022), focusing on Indic language computing and cultural artifact preservation; and Samagata Foundation (2023), backing projects in science, culture, art, technology, and education to create public commons and community spaces.
SS: Why do you call yourself a hobbyist software developer? What is the intention of calling it as a hobby? When it [Zerodha] is such a big platform, like known all over.
KN: I started tinkering with code. I started writing code when I was about 13 years old. Right. Very formative years and I was addicted. I still am I still write code every single day. And that’s really my mental foundation. Building technology, experimenting with software, writing code. So I started doing all of that as a hobby from a very young age and it also became moved into a professional thing. But I think my mental foundation is that when I close my eyes and think of myself, I identify myself as a hobbyist coder. Yes, Zerodha is a commercial large financial enterprise and I write code at Zerodha on a daily basis, practically. And I write code on free open source projects that I maintain on a daily basis. The lines blurred a very long time ago. It all largely is like a hobby to me. And I don’t see myself as a business person or a techno-business person. I see myself as a hobbyist coder.
SS: That’s such a different way of thinking about it. So in our session that we just had, we were talking about how in the time of AI today we could reimagine copyright in a very different way and how the current system is probably not as it’s not achieving what it’s meant to. But it’s changing with how the world is changing with AI. So could you elaborate on what, how you would reimagine copyright in the world of AI?
KN: Copyright is a rather new thing. It’s a legal framework and it’s very human centric and an author/creator creates something they hold copyright over it for X years. Varies slightly across jurisdictions But fundamentally it’s a human centric thing for things that humans created. Then it got expanded into covering different kinds of entities. A corporation or a legal entity can create something and they can hold copyright over it. But it’s very genesis is basically that, you know, individual creator and what not. Then legal entities. When we speak of AI, which is machine intelligence and I use the word intelligence very carefully, it’s still ill-defined or undefined rather. Trying to force fit something that was created for humans and human creation into synthetic creation where machine uses certain kinds of intelligence whatever that may be to create something. I mean fundamentally sounds incomparable. If the whole thing was built for humans, how can you transpose that.. transpose that one is to one to a machine framework. So logically it’s that. Now we’re all globally it seems, this is all being tried out right now. Normally it really knows where it goes. So societally, largely everybody seems to be attempting to force fit AI. This whole new paradigm into existing and old frameworks. Might not work at all. We might have to rethink what copyright means and copyright in itself is one thing which also has to over a period of time come to embody many things. It’s to protect an individual, It’s to protect a corporation, It’s also a monopoly granted to an individual and a corporation. There’s economic aspects to it. There’s ethical aspects to it. There’s all kinds of things, right? Everything under one large framework called copyright. I think the rise of AI is now challenging the very notion of this one large umbrella concept. So it might have to split into many. So I don’t think anybody really knows where it goes, but it’s fundamentally incompatible and it’s very foundation has been challenged by machine intelligence.
SS: Right. Another thing that we spoke about in class was technology sovereignty and where India is heading to today in terms of acquiring technology. So could you elaborate on how you would want or how you look at India going forward in terms of technology sovereignty?
KN: So sovereignty is now especially in the last four or five years of very volatile geopolitical conditions, software services being sanctioned and you know, certain countries being completely cut off from accessing software elsewhere has really woken the world up to this idea of central software dependencies, technological dependencies and suddenly everybody is open to the idea of sovereignty. Everybody is exploring it. Can every country, can every entity build all the technology they need from scratch in house or within the country? That’s not possible. The world doesn’t.. civilization doesn’t work that way. So what does sovereignty really mean? It’s not about having everything from scratch within it. That’s not it..In the geopolitical context and there are many different contexts. I think sovereign is a very geopolitical word. In the geopolitical context it really comes down to self-sustenance, self-reliability and the ability to run and maintain your technology without external intervention or external dependencies. That’s largely the geopolitical sense.
Let’s say you use software to run governments, institutions, etc. And that’s a subscription. That software is a subscription operated by software company elsewhere in a different jurisdiction, different country. And suddenly that’s cut off. The entire country is left hanging. So how do you prevent that? For that you need to self-host. It’s a very technical term. You need to self-host software. You don’t have to build everything from scratch yourself because it’s impossible. You need to be able to run and maintain this software on your own. And open source software free and open source software as a concept it’s been around for decades as a model of building technologies, software decent large scale decentralized innovation when millions of people come together collaboratively build tech has been a thing over the last two-plus decades of internet proliferation. And pretty much every tech company that is minted today or every government that rolls out technology, heavily uses open source software within it. So if you take a large piece of open source software which is built and given away over the internet by contributors from dozens and if not hundreds of countries. And this open source software built in such a manner is used in all context. That really brings in with it with its tenants, the very idea of sovereignty So in free and open source software you are accorded certain freedoms. Generally it’s called four freedoms: freedom to use, copy, modify, redistribute and do whatever you like with it. It doesn’t matter who created it. Doesn’t matter how many people contributed. If it’s a piece of software That comes with a certain license. You can take it and build whatever you want on top of it without worrying about any incumbents, royalty, etc etc. Nobody can cut you off. You have full freedom to run it within yourself. And that’s the open source software is the model for software innovation in the world right now. Everything, the entire internet runs on free and open source software. billions of phones and all our devices around free and open source software. So in terms of tech sovereignty, if you adopt open source software, build your critical systems on top of it, irrespective of who’s making it, irrespective of expected of who’s collaborating. You must also collaborate. That that is largely a shortcut to attaining tech sovereignty. You get the best technology built by people across the world for yourself. You keep it you use it. Like I said, you must also contribute back to improve it because that’s the very nature of open source software. And you attain self..you attain self-sufficiency and tech sovereignty. Nobody can just cut you off. Even if somebody just cuts you off, you still have what you’re running. You still have access to its source code. Then it’s a matter of skills and ability.
So in my view, two really critical recipes for tech sovereignty at a national level, open source as a philosophy and methodology and tangible artifacts software that you can use. And deep capacity, engineering, research and ecosystem to build and maintain those things and to contribute back because you can’t just be a user who’s simply downloads and uses technology. So it’s that the ability to the skills and ability at a societal level and the use of open source is the most strategic way to attain tech, tech self-sufficiency and sovereignty.
SS: And when you said about contributing to the ecosystem as a whole, how do you think lawyers can play a role in the open source movement and in contributing to this ecosystem and also achieving the sovereignty and sustenance which we are looking at?
KN: Ironically, paradoxically, open source software is all about freedoms, distribution, replication without encumbrances and you know royalties. And yet it is the legal foundations of it is built on the legal foundations of copyright. There’s a thing called copy left. You use the copyright framework to assert these freedoms and you know via open source licenses and what not So open source as a philosophy and methodology of development and sharing and collaboration is one thing. But it’s very basis is legal. So there’s no separating law and legality from open source. Intellectual property is a big component of this software patents which I don’t think should exist. There are absurd. The very notion is absurd are a big part of this Software patents especially in India you can’t patent software per se, which is a good thing because when I was 13 years old when I was copy-pasting code over dial-up internet learning to build stuff and I was building small user interfaces buttons. Whatever I felt like building. I must have been violating a lot of software patents. If you draw a square button on a software UI that’s probably somebody’s patent. If you add a click to it and something changes on the UI that somebody else’s patent.
The software is literally mathematical expression and if you take the route of patenting all the things you can do with software, then nobody can innovate. Nobody can write two lines of code to do anything. The very notion is absurd. But it’s also matter of legality. So So where can the legal community come in? everywhere. Tech policy is a reality. Internet is increasingly regulated. Software is going to be increasingly regulated. AI is going to be regulated. Nobody really knows how the policy makers and regulators may not really have the technology. Technology does not have the legal or policy know-how. So the future of software technology and innovation is going to be increasingly legislative. It has been my feeling. We are already seeing that. So it’s absolutely critical for techies to get a legal, basic legal and policy understanding. Absolutely critical for lawyers and the legal community to get a tech understanding. What is open source? Why open source? Not from the narrow lens of legal definitions and licenses and contracts but from a holistic view.
SS: So basically again like the collaboration that you spoke of and expanding it beyond just contracts and copyright to a much larger scale where we also have interdisciplinary things coming into the other.
KN: 100% contracts legal documents are artefacts. Artefacts that attempt to codify really complex societal things into a flat, 2D thing. You can’t capture all the stuff that happens at a civilisation scale into contracts and documents. We have technologically especially in the age of since the advent of internet, India has progressed technologically significantly using open source software. Our governments use open source software. Zerodha uses open source software The entire tech ecosystem uses open source software. Imagine if there was strict and arbitrary software patent enforcement, Every single thing would be a patent infringement. So the reality of India’s progress and the need for innovation, the nature of innovation be captured into a contract. No. Which is why that deeper understanding is critical. It’s existential.
SS: And also at this point of time there’s like a huge lot of scope in the field. Like at least for lawyers in the tech field and in the open source moment. There’s a lot of potential for them at this point because there’s so much more to explore than the traditional system of just limiting themselves to what is already existant.
KN: Absolutely. I mean with the advent of AI, last language models. I’ve been hearing that in the legal community. A lot of research work that people who do, you know, junior lawyers would do is now being done by AI. You feed in a PDF with 200 pages. You get a five line bullet point summary. We’re seeing that in the tech world also. So it’s not just that this is unexplored. And it has to be explored because the progress of society and civilization itself depends on having the right kind of tech regulations, frameworks, legal frameworks around it. It’s also the fact that a lot of stuff is just going to be taken over by AI. So if you pay attention to these things, it also gives you an edge. I shouldn’t ideally be saying it because it’s not only about competing, but that’s the reality. It gives you an edge if you’re aware of these things. If you’re aware of tech policy from a tech centric view, if you understand open source innovation, it’s crux.
SS: Again, this brings me to one more thing that was speaking about in class. So you said that software patent is not something that should be in existence.
KN: Shouldn’t exist.
SS: But we also see how we’re moving towards a space where more patent applications more patents, equals more innovation, which is not the right track, which is not really the right transparent information that is put out. So what is your opinion on innovation while looking at software patents?
KN: I think the number of patents being a proxy or an indicator for innovation is fundamentally wrong. That’s like saying that’s like basing the innovation a company can do on the head count of people there, which is also done. Company X as 100 people, company Y has 1000 people, maybe the larger companies innovative. So none of these things are proxies for innovation, not the number of people, not the lines of code that you have. Because by that metric, given two software projects, they do similar things, one with more lines of code should have more innovation. Paradoxically, counterintuitively, that’s the other way around. The more you can achieve with the fewer lines of code, the better the engineering and innovation there. And I can cite Zerodha as an example. We handle close to, I think some 20% of India’s capital market volumes, we have 1.7 million customers, and tens of thousands of transactions per second, We are 15 years old at this point. A tech product team is 35 people. That’s it. We self host all software in-house using open source software. We don’t have software vendors who build software for us in that sense. But if you look at some other players in the market who compete with us, they have very large tech teams, hundreds of people, hundreds and hundreds of people. 10X bigger than us If head count was a proxy to software innovation that fails right here I can confidently say that we are pretty innovative So the moment you set a metric, some arbitrary metric without scientific or rational basis, as the proxy for progress anywhere, be it GDP, be it head count in a people, be it the number of patents that are filed. The entire system will just be incentivized geared towards increasing and attaining metric. If you say that highest number of patents will give you some incentive and companies will just start filing patents. You’ll have an entire legal department whose job is to file patents. I completely disagree with the fact that, sorry, with the idea that software patents are a proxy for innovation. In fact, I think it takes away and washes out innovation with arbitrary metrics which people are then forced to chase.
SS: There were some great sets of insights and things that you gave out. Thank you so much. It was a lovely time having this conversation with you and I’m sure people will be inspired by this and try and explore this area a little more considering the amount of scope and unexplored area it is today. So thank you so much for coming, sir. And for being here today.
KN: Thank you.