[edit]

After having been asked several times: this is a true story, she received her sentence yesterday, she really needs help.

I can't tell her name here, it could endanger her in many ways, if you wish to know more, contact me by email via nojailforflashdisk[at]gmail.com

[/edit]

I won't tell her name here. What you need to know is that my sweet Balinese friend, who likes kids and crafts, has been sentenced to a jail time of 18 month for, basically, having used her flashdisk.

She works in Bali, in a small painting and craft shop.
What they do is, they build picture catalogs from examples taken in magazines or on the web, and commission them to painters on customers orders.

Last year, she thought she could start her own business, and built a small website using some of her shop's references.
Keep in mind, these references don't belong to anybody in particular, they are just the result of some image search.
But apparently her boss didn't appreciate, and asked her to close the website.
Which she did. [edit: She never actually used the pics, and cancelled the website's publication]

It wasn't enough. Maybe Mr. Boss smelled good money, and he sued her for unfair competition.
Time passed, and many parties got involved.
It didn't take too long to find out there was no harm done business wise, but hey, you gotta get the money a way or another, so Mr.Boss sued her again, this time for illegal copy of digital material.

That's were things got really wrong.
See, worldwide, the law is already blurry when it comes to digital material... but in Indonesia it's even worse. First of nobody gives a damn, then the law stops at the basic anti-piracy jibber-jabber.

You can consult it online,  and if you speak the language, what you will read there is asinine.
"Any data accessed without explicit permission of the owner is considered accessed Illegally", that's what the law says.
Which is funny since you don't see any definition of "permission" and "ownership".
In Indonesia, it seems, browsing the web is illegal.

I am not a lawyer, but looking at the fact with some common sense you can see that a person not contractually tied by an NDA (or, actually by any kind of work contract) copying from a computer accessible to anybody, not protected by a password or any other means, files that are obtainable everywhere on the web, and using them in a way that was never meant to arm and did not cause any arm should never be legally worried, in any country.

But she... received 18 month jail time.

There is something very wrong behind that sentence, especially since you consider that the murderers of three Ahmadi, in Cikeusik, earlier this year, received between 3 and 6 month of emprisonment.

Please look again.

Using a flash disk: 18 months
Murder: 6 months

As I am writing these lines, I am not sure of what will happen next, my friend had a very tough time, was involved in a pretty heavy bike accident just before being dragged to court and she's at ther very end of her strenght.
She told me once she would rather die than go to jail. In another context, I wouldn't worry, but today she is emotionally exhausted, with not a dime left in her pocket to appeal, and about to be robbed 18 month of her life.I am worried she might attempt to arm herself.

This post is a cry for help. If you are a journalist, a fundation, a lawyer, please spread the news, help her appeal or take her case pro-bono. Help her and undo something very, very wrong.

You can contact me on on any of my social account, or via nojailforflashdisk[at]gmail.com , she needs all the help we can muster.

I discovered the Q&A web service Quora just yesterday and I'm late as a Santa in June.
I got immediately sucked in, thanks to its pretty clean interface and the relevance of the questions.

One of the first questions I answered was :
Will Quora become the next big thing here in Indonesia, or will it become just like another Formspring.me?

My answer is there,  and you can check it out. But here I wish to develop further on why Quora, if not the next big thing, could be right on time to get an established user base in Indonesia, and why this could be a win-win situation.

Why it can work

Indonesians are not afraid of asking.
You can say the opposite all you want, but I find Indonesians much more prone to asking things than, for instance, my fellow French.
Ranging from "Is time travel possible" to "What did you have for lunch" (oh dreaded question), I've seen all sort of questions flying my way, witnessed many debates, and it convinced me that knowledge thirst is real in Indonesia.

Indonesian culture is about sharing.
Well, probably not just sharing, that would be reductive, but for a huge part of it, it is.
On Quora, the sharing/networking features are spot on, not too much, not too little, with a link to Facebook and Twitter that really works.

Just a niche?

Quora is what it is, a Q&A service.
You won't share everything there, no photo album, no marketplace, no emotional status about your hamster's last failed relationship.
In other word: not much small talks, and it's precisely that small talk aspect that propelled Twitter and Facebook on the top of Indonesia's internet usage.

Quora's penetration in the Indonesian market will also be slowed down by its lack of mobile app.
Yes, mobile broadband is huge there, with a penetration rate of nearly 77% in march 2010 (latest number I'm aware of).

English is compulsory. Too bad.
Many local Facebook and Twitter users communicate in their native language. Indonesian is the second language in Twitter's trending topics (or was last time I checked). This is not, of course, exclusive to Indonesia and is also particularly true for China, Japan and Brazil.

These three facts make the service more restrictive than the more comprehensive Facebook or the faster Twitter, and more likely to attract a crew of active hobbyists and professionals rather than the average internet users.

Why a win-win?

A win for Quora if they manage to keep on attracting local users: The Indonesian user base will be active, dynamic and very versatile, and bring to the site a steady flow of interesting questions about many topics.

A win for Indonesia, as they have a very active entrepreneurial scene, especially in the new technologies and social media field. Quora could be just the right tool to let them show their real potential to the world while getting even more in touch with the tech trends.