The Indian blogging community comes together to fight alleged copyright violation by Internet companies, observes March 5 as ''Remove Plagiarism'' day
BANGALORE: More than one hundred Indian blogs have joined hands to protest alleged instances of plagiarism by Yahoo India.
Surya Gayathri, a blogger, alleged that the beta version of Yahoo Malayalam had lifted six recipes from her blog without her knowledge.
Her page displayed screen shots of Yahoo Malayalam, the content of which she alleged was lifted from her page.
The plagiarized content was later removed after bloggers contacted Yahoo.
Irked by Yahoo’s attitude, the blogging community came out in full support of Gayathri and observed March 5 as the “Remove Plagiarism” day. Bloggers demanded an apology from Yahoo.
“It is a little amusing, amazing and agonizing to see how the corporate world looks at the blogs and bloggers as silly little creatures, which they can play with, manipulate and crush at their will,” a blog called Copyright Violations said.
Many bloggers expressed shock at the incident. “Recently Yahoo! India launched a Malayalam Language Portal (along with other Indian languages), but they copied content from many Malayalam bloggers, which were protected under Creative Common Licensing. None of the bloggers were contacted and it was a rude shock to us that giants like Yahoo! would do this,” Santhosh Pillai, a blogger wrote.
Some blogs displayed comments in support of Gayathri, and even came up with anti-Yahoo icons and cartoons.
“Why is this is dear to me? Just because we write and take pictures due to our passion for food and writing and give the content for free for others to cook and create, that doesn’t mean someone can take us for a ride and copy our content, especially a giant corporation like Yahoo!” said a blogger who writes under the nickname Inji Pennu.
“The content in this page was provided by WebDunia,” the Yahoo Malayalam page said.
Another blogger wrote: “We all make mistakes, we apologize later. Don’t we all? To live in a society we have to follow such norms. We bloggers complained to Yahoo! and Yahoo! India. How did they respond? They simply refused to apologize. Yahoo! India office even had the audacity to claim copying contents is not copyright violation. The subcontractor (WebDunia) for Yahoo! India claims all was done on ‘good faith’. Contents were removed from Yahoo’s domain silently. If this was done on good faith and there was no copyright violation? Isn’t this a shame? Imagine if it was between two corporations instead of corporate vs blog? It would have been any lawyers’ dream.”
Yahoo could not be contacted on Tuesday despite repeated attempts.
Many bloggers had earlier alleged of other prominent India Web sites taking content from their pages without permission.
© CyberMedia News
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