The Centre for Intellectual Property Rights Research and Advocacy [CIPRA] is a public interest Intellectual Property Rights Research centre based at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, India. The National Law School is a not for profit law university supported by the Bar Council of India and the Government of India. One of the major projects that CIPRA has undertaken in the last year is to design and develop a comprehensive web site for Indian Intellectual Property Law Resources with the domain name www.iprlawindia.org. We had for the first eight months contracted with a major Indian software developer to design and implement the project at commercial rates. This was a most frustrating encounter with technology company's that forced us to look elsewhere for solutions. The core problems with the web site designed for us included the following:

· We had two large databases that needed to be continuously updated and maintained. However, the web site developer had exclusive control over the process of uploading and organizing material that left us with very little control over the status of the site.

· In order to respond to the changing policy concerns of the intellectual property arena we needed to maintain a dynamic and changing web site. That would mean that we should have the ability to create and delete existing categories of presenting material, but this too was in the hands of the developer.

· Lastly in order to create an online user community we had to give the user a sense of ownership and an ability to feed in to the sites contents.

For these reasons and more we found ourselves in a situation where we had abundant legal resources that had been developed after painstaking research but could not be put onto the web site for technological reasons. At this stage it was clear that we needed to redesign our web site in such a way that the technology we used allowed users with the technological ability to work a desktop computer with standard applications and had the necessary legal knowledge to maintain and use the site. That took us to MAHITI's door. After a lengthy design and development phase we ended up with a web site that used the Knowledge Manager Backend. This software directly addressed the core concerns we raised above. It is as easy to use as a windows based word processor and took our team of three a couple of hours to master. Further, it allows us to change the categories under which we arrange material which gives us an infinite flexibility to order and rearrange information to our needs. Lastly, it allows for an active interface to be built with our online user community by building a sense of ownership by allowing for remote uploading of information by interested users. We achieved all of these objectives at one third the cost that we had initially contracted with the major developer. Our three member team has in the last fortnight uploaded up to 1500 documents that run into at least 15000 web pages of information. As we prepare for a re-launch in a weeks time we will put all of these ideas and the technology that supports it to the real test.

Sudhir Krishnaswamy [skrishnaswamy@nls.ac.in],
Centre Head
Centre for Intellectual Property Rights Research and Advocacy
National Law School Of India University, Bangalore, India.