Rachael A.

She noticed that you could go online and find out which restaurant to eat at. But if you had just been sexually assaulted in India, there was nowhere to look up what to do next. Not what to feel. What to actually do. Which police station. Which section of law. Whether a hospital could refuse you. Her name is Trisha Shetty. She was born in Mumbai on 16th September 1990. Her mother encouraged her, as a child, to speak up when she saw something unfair. She studied political science and psychology at Jai Hind College, then took a law degree at the University of Mumbai. In 2015 she started an organisation called SheSays. The idea was deliberately unglamorous. Not a march. Not a hashtag. A website that explains, in plain language and in several Indian languages, what the law actually says and what a survivor can do next. Which sections apply. What a police station is legally obliged to do. What a hospital cannot refuse. What happens at each stage if you file. That information existed before. It was scattered across legal databases and government documents written for lawyers. She put it in one place, in language a frightened 19 year old could read at 2 in the morning. Then the organisation went further. Staff started physically accompanying survivors and their families to police stations, hospitals and courts. Anyone who has been to an Indian police station to report something difficult knows why that matters more than any amount of legal text. A person sitting beside you changes how you are treated. SheSays also runs sexual violence prevention sessions in schools and workplaces, built around bystander intervention. What to do when you see something, rather than what to do after it has happened to you. The numbers she works against are grim. Fewer than 6% of incidents of sexual violence against women in India are reported to the police. She has been open about what the work has cost her personally. After she spoke publicly about marital rape, she has said people threatened to kill her, and said that this curly haired girl should be gang raped and thrown out of India. She kept going. She was an inaugural Obama Foundation Scholar at Columbia University. She has been named a United Nations Young Leader for the Sustainable Development Goals, and a Queen's Young Leader. Forbes put her on its 30 under 30 list. Vogue India named her Woman of the Year. In 2018 she became vice president of the steering committee of the Paris Peace Forum, and the following year its president. She turns 36 this week. She did not build a campaign. She built the thing that was missing, which was an instruction manual.

3 of the biggest academic publishers in the world sued a photocopy shop. The shop charged 50 paise a page. It sat inside a university campus in Delhi and had 1 owner. The case ran for 4 years. The shop won, and the law changed. His name is Dharampal Singh. He set up Rameshwari Photocopy Service in 1998, in a small licensed space inside the Delhi School of Economics at the University of Delhi. The work was simple. Professors would prepare a reading list. For a course like Agrarian Sociology, that might mean 33 different readings, scattered across 33 different books, most of which cost more than a student's monthly budget and some of which the library had 1 copy of. Singh photocopied the relevant chapters, bound them together, and sold the bundle. It was called a course pack. The price was 50 paise per page. That is less than 1 American cent. He explained it in 1 sentence. If a student needs 33 readings for a course, he said, it could take months to collect them from different books. I make life easier for students by giving them all the material in 1 pack. In August 2012, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Taylor and Francis filed suit in the Delhi High Court against the shop and against the University of Delhi. They wanted a permanent injunction. By the end of 2012 the court had granted a temporary one. A commissioner was sent to the shop without warning, made an inventory, and seized copies. Then something unusual happened. Students organised. 2 groups, one of students and one for educational access, formally applied to join the case as defendants, on the side of the photocopy shop. The court allowed it. In March 2013, 309 authors and academics from around the world wrote an open letter to the publishers asking them to withdraw the case. 33 of those 309 had written the very books whose copyright was allegedly being infringed. The authors were siding with the shop copying their books. On 16th September 2016, Justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw dismissed the suit entirely. He wrote that copyright in literary works is not an inevitable, divine or natural right conferring absolute ownership on authors. The publishers appealed. On 9th December 2016, a 2 judge bench of the Delhi High Court delivered the final ruling. It held that reproducing copyrighted material for the purpose of educational instruction is not infringement under Indian law, and that no licence or permission from the publisher is required for a course pack, however much of the book is copied, as long as it is justified by teaching. Then the publishers withdrew from the case entirely. The shop is still there. The next time you are told that intellectual property law always favours whoever has the most expensive lawyers, remember that 3 of the largest publishers on Earth spent 4 years trying to shut down a photocopy shop charging half a rupee a page. And lost.