Stealing, and copying ..
December 9th, 2005 at 10:16am
With blogs becoming popular these days, everyone wants to start up a blog. But once the blog is up, some people wont know what to write in there (or they are too lazy!). So.. what do they do ?
Yes. … you guessed it write! Ctrl+C and then Ctrl+V. Copy. Steal.
The first such major incidence in the Indian Blog Sphere came into full limelight when a blogger called Rohan Pinto started copying posts from other blogs (which he thought were intresting) on his blog without proper attribution. And, he got back what he deserved! (A search of his name on google would show the results). Rohan ended up pulling down his site, and issuing a public apology for his innocent copying act.
Then, there was this case where one of the Neha’s posts was convienently copied!. (I love the first comment!)
Then the next one that gained quite a lot of attention was the post by Jagadish called ” IT is not like that !“. Its an Kannada+English mix post which was widely forwarded by mail as “….yavaag foreign ge ?”, and quite a lot of folks posted it on their blog (including me!, but with proper attribution). Some did not know who the original author was, and they posted it saying that they received it as a mail forward. That’s fine too, since they did not claim that they wrote the post.
Now, whats interesting about this episode is, one lady converted that post from Kannada+English to Tamil+English with the title “eppo foreign pore ?”, and posted it on her blog claiming that she was the original author! That too a month after the original post was made. The original author was notified by a third person about this!!! But Jagadish did a fantastic job in this regard and the effect is …. the Lady’s blog + profile is no more on the net! (but you can still it on Google cache for some more time)
The latest victim of plagiarism is of a blogger by the name Suyog, who had posted a photo on his blog. This photo was picked by an advertising company and used it one of their campaigns without Suyog’s permission. ie, for commercial purpose, and this episode too has evoked a strong response from bloggers! [Via Kribs]
Just wondering what next..?
Tags: copy, copying, copyright, illegal, piracy, plagiarism, steal, stealing
Related Posts
7 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
[...] Arjun Prabhu has a round-up on blog-based plagarism. A mental kick to all those who steal content! (Ggrr) [...]
Pingback by DesiPundit » Stop Stealing! — December 9, 2005 #
How do you treat copying of entire blogrolls?…..have seen cases where entire blogrolls (including mine) have been found with similar descriptions / titles in other blogs.
Comment by Kaps — December 9, 2005 #
Cool info…. Have seen lotsa instances like this… If you cant think for urself, rip off others thoughts seems to be the mantra! Plagiarism sucks!!!!
Comment by dev — December 9, 2005 #
Hi, good read.
One question though. How can you prove someone has copied you and it’s not you that has copied him? After all, blogger lets you publish something with a backdate?
I guess only your loyal readers would know about it.
Comment by Mezba — December 10, 2005 #
Mezba : Good point. But its pretty easy to detect who the culprit is. Like its said… the thief always leaves some hints behind :).
Yes, regular readers can definitely sense the difference.
Comment by Arjun — December 10, 2005 #
@Kaps: I think copying blogrolls is OK. A blogroll is generally just a list of links. There is nothing creative about it except maybe an interesting title.
In fact if somebody copies your blogroll it may be a compliment in disguise because she is saying that she also likes to read what you read.
Consider this. I come to your blog. I see your blogroll. I sample a few blogs in there and realize that you have an excellent collection of blogs. I promptly add all of them to my feedreader. I publish the list to my own blog.
Comment by Varun — December 12, 2005 #
@Varun : Then the assumption would be that the person who is picking it up is *really intrested* in all the blogs. Ifs its jut to get attention, then I would still say its not fair.
Because, when visitors click the links and reach the blogs on the blogroll, the owners of the target blog might visit back to see who has linked to them.
Comment by Arjun — December 12, 2005 #