Information, Communication and Information Policy Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The answer is the Delivery of Books and Newspaper Act.

The Delivery of Books and Newspapers (Public Libraries) Act, 1954 obliges every publisher in India to send one copy of each book and newspaper it publishes to the National Library at Kolkata and to three other designated public libraries. That legal deposit is how the National Library builds its national collection.

The Registration of Books Act (the Press and Registration of Books Act, 1867) deals with registering printers and publications and sending copies to government, not deposit in the National Library. The Copyright Act protects authors' rights and carries no library deposit duty in India, and the Right to Information Act concerns access to government records.

Answer: C

Standards are not covered by IPR.

Intellectual property rights protect creations of the mind: patents protect inventions, trademarks protect brand names and marks, industrial designs protect the ornamental appearance of products, and copyright, geographical indications and similar rights cover other creations. Each gives its owner an exclusive right for a period.

A standard, such as one issued by BIS or ISO, is an agreed specification for a product or process, meant to be widely adopted. It is not itself a category of intellectual property, even though the published text of a standard may be protected by copyright. Patents, trademarks and industrial designs are all standard categories of IPR, so they are wrong.

Answer: C

The answer is that ownership is automatic.

Under the Berne Convention and the Copyright Act, 1957 in India, copyright comes into existence as soon as an original work is created and fixed; registration is not a condition of protection. Registration with the Copyright Office is optional and only serves as prima facie evidence of the particulars entered, which helps in a dispute.

So an author who never registered still owns the copyright and can go to court over it. The options saying there is no ownership without registration, that ownership cannot be claimed, or that it may not be legally tenable all treat registration as necessary, which it is not.

Answer: A

The correct matching is a-i, b-ii, c-iv, d-iii.

The two firm pairs come from what each law is for. The Copyright Act protects the ownership of intellectual property (c-iv), and the Right to Information Act gives citizens a right to get required information from public authorities (d-iii).

Under the Delivery of Books and Newspapers Act, 1954, publishers deposit copies with the National Library and other designated libraries, and the Central Reference Library compiles the Indian National Bibliography from those books (b-ii). Copies registered under the Press and Registration of Books Act, 1867 are delivered to the state government, and in many states they are kept in the State Central Library (a-i).

Only one code keeps Copyright with ownership and RTI with getting information, which settles it.

Answer: A

The order of enactment is (d), (a), (c), (b).

1. Indian Copyright Act: 1957.
2. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (USA): 1998.
3. Information Technology Act: 2000.
4. Right to Information Act: 2005.

The Copyright Act comes first by four decades, which rules out codes starting with (a) or (b). Of the two codes starting with (d), the other one places the Right to Information Act second, but it is the latest of the four. The usual trap is the IT Act and the DMCA, two years apart: the American law came first.

Answer: A

The aims are (i) and (ii), so the answer is (i) and (ii) are correct.

Copyright gives creators exclusive rights for a limited time so that they are rewarded for their work. That reward is meant to stimulate creative authorship (i), and, because the work is protected, to encourage authors to publish and so make intellectual works publicly available (ii).

Freedom of access to information (iii) is the counterweight to copyright, served by exceptions such as fair dealing and by the public domain, not an aim of the law itself. Publishers' profit (iv) may follow from it but is not what copyright law sets out to achieve. Codes including (iii) or (iv) are wrong.

Answer: C

The answer is (A) is false but (B) is true.

Statement (A) is false. Information management handles recorded, explicit information: acquiring, organising, storing and retrieving it. Knowledge management goes further, capturing and sharing the tacit know-how in people's heads and the organisation's practices, through communities of practice, expertise directories and the like.

Statement (B) is true as a description of usage: in everyday and even professional writing the words knowledge and information are often used loosely as if they meant the same thing, which is precisely why statement (A) is a common confusion.

Answer: D

Library standards in India are developed by the BIS, the Bureau of Indian Standards.

The BIS, India's national standards body (formerly the Indian Standards Institution), prepares standards for documentation and library work through its committee on documentation and information, covering such things as library buildings and fittings, bibliographic references and transliteration.

The RRRLF funds public libraries, the National Library is a collecting and bibliographic institution, and DRDO is the defence research organisation (its DESIDOC serves defence information needs). None of them is the standards-making body.

Answer: C

The phrase 'paperless society' was coined by F.W. Lancaster.

F. Wilfrid Lancaster predicted in the late 1970s, in Toward Paperless Information Systems (1978) and related writing, that electronic communication would largely replace print for scientific and technical information, a vision he called the paperless society.

Eugene Garfield (Eugine in the paper) founded the Science Citation Index, Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft, and Tom Davenport is known for writing on knowledge management and information ecology; none of them coined this phrase.

Answer: B

The University's key is (ii) and (iii) are correct: data and textbooks.

The question treats information generation as the ways information comes into being or is recorded, and the key counts data (raw facts from experiments, surveys and records) and textbooks (published records of established knowledge) as such modes. Options A, C and D each contain at most one of the two.

What could not be confirmed: no textbook or reference was found that lists exactly these four as modes of information generation. Observation and the thought process are the more natural ways information is generated, so this item rests on the examiner's own classification. The explanation follows the key and does not claim a source for it.