Speaking Freely: Prasanth Sugathan

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Interviewer: David Greene

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.*

Prasanth Sugathan is Legal Director at Software Freedom Law Center, India. (SFLC.in). Prasanth is a lawyer with years of practice in the fields of technology law, intellectual property law, administrative law and constitutional law. He is an engineer turned lawyer and has worked closely with the Free Software community in India. He has appeared in many landmark cases before various Tribunals, High Courts and the Supreme Court of India. He has also deposed before Parliamentary Committees on issues related to the Information Technology Act and Net Neutrality.

David Greene: Why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself. 

Sugathan: I am Prasanth Sugathan, I am the Legal Director at the Software Freedom Law Center, India. We are a nonprofit organization based out of New Delhi, started in the year 2010. So we’ve been working at this for 14 years now, working mostly in the area of protecting rights of citizens in the digital space in India. We do strategic litigation, policy work, trainings, and capacity building. Those are the areas that we work in. 

Greene: What was your career path? How did you end up at SFLC? 

That’s an interesting story. I am an engineer by training. Then I was interested in free software. I had a startup at one point and I did a law degree along with it. I got interested in free software and got into it full time. Because of this involvement with the free software community, the first time I think I got involved in something related to policy was when there was discussion around software patents. When the patent office came out with a patent manual and there was this discussion about how it could affect the free software community and startups. So that was one discussion I followed, I wrote about it, and one thing led to another and I was called to speak at a seminar in New Delhi. That’s where I met Eben and Mishi from the Software Freedom Law Center. That was before SFLC India was started, but then once Mishi started the organization I joined as a Counsel. It’s

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