Deshabhimani gets way too abhimani after plagiarising a picture
In an interesting twist, not only did Deshabhimani, a leading Malayalam language daily, publish a picture from the blog post of Cranium Bolts, they also seem to think that it’s their LEGAL right to do so! Read the account of Cranium Bolts for more. Such cases should be definitely taught a legal lesson by suing them in court.
Website with Plagiarised Content
There is a website by the name of history-of-india.net This site is filled with plagiarised content. Infact, one of my article on Akbar that was published in Encyclopedia of Leadership (Sage, 2004), and later on hosted by me at
http://www.i3pep.org/archives/2004/11/12/akbar/
has been copy pasted on the above mentioned site at
http://history-of-india.net/akbar_the_great.htm
I had brought up this matter when I found it at
http://www.codingforums.com/showthread.php?t=152029
To top it, the owner of the plagiarising site goes by the name of ‘Satya’ ! I had somehow managed to get the email of that guy, and also wrote an email to him. The details of that correspondence I have put up on my site:
http://indiapoint.net/archives/2010/05/31/internet-plagiarism/
However, till date I find that the offending and plagiarising website continues to host my article without any attribution or link.
Also, the Copyright policy of my website, clearly says that no one is allowed to make copy of full content of any webpage and post it on another site.
Anup Mukherjee
indiapoint.net
Success case – Rediff steals uses photograph without permission
Arun who writes on Paintedstork.com got a shocker when he saw that Rediff had used one of his images without permission. He followed up with them and it seems he’s getting credit as well as compensation for the image used without permission. Let’s hope the compensation is making up for the damages caused (now that image has been “sold” to correct the theft and can not be used under other licenses, hence causing loss to owner)
Stolen image:
Original image:
The London Photographic Association vs EPUK
Reporting a non-Indian plagiarism case this time. Former Magnum director Neil Burgess’s article “For God’s sake, Somebody Call It” had been lifted from EPUK and used by the London Photographic Association for a promotional campaign. (Now removed)
Apparently, after pointing out the plagiarism, EPUK members talking about piracy also received threatening phone calls! Read more here as reported by EPUK. As always, rampant plagiarism in the entire world.
Network 18 does copyright violation!
Naina recently discovered that Network 18′s site in.com has been using 4 of her “All rights reserved” images without taking permission! To top it all they put up a message on the site saying “Images may be subjected to copyright” without bothering to follow copyright laws themselves. The images have now been taken down from their website, however such a practice, as can be seen is pretty rampant. More here: Copyright Violation by Network 18
Snapdeal does a “Snap steal”
In the latest case of online plagiarism SnapDeal stole Paavani’s “All rights reserved” image and used it on their website, complete with her watermark on the image! And of course without any permission because as always Snapdeal thought they would never get caught and that everything on the internet is for free. Have net, will steal.
Perhaps they are unaware that plagiarism is a legal offence and can snap them a deal of a fine of upto 2 lakhs and/or imprisonment for 6 months.
Paavani has written to them, however it seems Snapdeal isn’t as snappy in professional communication as they are in snapping up steals. Paavani has blogged about it here.
We await an update from Paavani. Following are her original image and snapdeal’s stolen image, which of course they quietly removed but forgot that computers have print screen key these days.
How YouTube thinks about copyright
This is an interesting video from TED.com on how YouTube thinks about copyright. It gets us to the fact that in a lot of cases, copyright is a very subjective area.
Shocking reactions to plagiarism
Came across this carefully researched piece by Karthik, where he finds out that a blogging competition organised by U.S. consulate, chennai has chosen a plagiarist for a winner! Not just that, when Karthik confronts them, they look in the other direction and say
“It seems you examined and reflected on the featured blogs – we continue to be proud of Rajat, the finalists and the rest of the 100+ contestants. We want to encourage youth to be part of the global discourse and we hope that this is the first of many blog competitions on the horizon.”
What does the US consulate stand to gain by NOT taking legal action against something illegal? Maybe their whole PR exercise will fall flat on its face and that’s what’s dissuading them.
Read the full post here.
TOI does it yet again
Times of India, not only reused the work of professional photographer, Kalyan Varma, but also got let off very very very easily. In Kalyan’s words, “I had to work real hard to get permits to enter the cave and spend a lot of money to just access it and photograph it. Being a long time contributor of Wikipedia, I thought it would be a good to add this photo for the article as no other photo exists for this species.“
Wikipedia is where TOI picked the photograph from and reused it without respecting the CC-license. Kalyan insisted on a first page apology and got it.
But at the risk of repeating myself, we need something much more than just a front page apology to put an end to this daylight robbery that too at the hands of a publishing house.
Introduction to CHORI
CHeck Online Rights Infringement (chori) is an initiative to get all stakeholders in the digital media space – the producers, the consumers, the ignorant, the influencers and possibly the likely plaigiarisers - under one umbrella.
This initiative took birth because of Twilight Fairy’s experience with plagiarism of her content. Increasing awareness about this issue is a major requirement now.
As we know, in the internet age, pilferage of user generated content has increased immensely. Technology has made it easier to steal content and pass it off as one’s own. As creators many of us do not know about our rights or as consumers – the limit to which we can use someone elses content. This is an attempt to increase awareness, eradicate plagiarism and tackle cases when such a thing unfortunately happens.
This group is for you, if you are an online content generator, consumer, lawyer, media person, creative agency,photographer, blogger, journalist, activists, or technologist.
CHORI is a non-funded self initiative and depends on your support to continue successfully to spread this awareness and to help all of us in defending our digital rights.