Press Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V for trouble

Priya Padmanabhan

BANGALORE: "Necessity is the mother of invention," goes the saying. A recent development, involving Yahoo! India, makes one take a relook at this saying in the age of citizen journalists.

Portals, in an apparent bid to gain popularity, are coming up with more localized content in regional languages. The latest one to join this bandwagon is Yahoo! India, which is now beta-testing its portals in seven Indian languages.

One of the major difficulties portals face is the paucity of regional language content and Internet-friendly, experienced writers, who are proficient in regional languages.

The demand for local content on the Internet and mobile phones has led to the mushrooming of many a content company. Many of them have small editorial teams to populate the portal they are catering to.

The increasing number of content providers seems to have caught the attention of the Union Government also. This year’s Union Budget has extended the service tax net to cover content providers to telecoms and ad agencies.

Coming back to the Yahoo! episode, the Internet major outsourced the content development to Webdunia.

As mentioned many others outsource content development. This enables them to reduce costs as well as avoid the additional burden of overseeing content development and uploading them on to the respective portals.

However, there is a catch. The portals do not have a foolproof mechanism to check the originality of the content being uploaded on them. This, at times, has encouraged the copy-paste syndrome, with the demand for content outstripping supply.

S Unnikrishnan, a business journalist-turned-Internet entrepreneur feels, balancing quality with profitability of the organization is a tough ask for many players who provide content to companies.

“Many Internet players copy content these days. But they are smart enough to rewrite the content beyond recognition and add stuff. Only fools copy it exactly," he comments.

But then, it does not mean content providers are hiring fools. On the contrary, pressures for better margins and dearth of talent is forcing many a content provider to hire people with little or no journalistic experience, forget their familiarity with Copyright Act or Media Laws.

Recipe for trouble

The content providers usually have a few experienced journalists to oversee the work, but with huge amounts of content being generated on a daily basis, they tend to ignore the ‘less significant’ sections, such as recipes.

For some, it makes the perfect recipe for trouble.

One such case is that of Yahoo! India. The Internet major expressed regret over a recipe published on its Malayalam portal, after a blogger alleged that the content was taken from her blog without permission.

To avoid such copy-paste incidents in future, Unnikrishnan suggests, “I think the portals that utilize their (content provider) services should institute some quality checking mechanism at their (portals) end and also build clauses on staff quality into the contracts.”

Mirroring the blog

Amit Varma, owner of a popular blog, India Uncut, recently experienced a case where an unknown person created a mirror site of his blog and copied everything, from the the site design to blog articles and reader comments without any attribution or acknowledgement.

Varma dealt with the issue by getting in touch with the Web hosting company and formally registering a complaint with them. He says that all content on blogs is treated as published content and enjoys copyright protection by default.

The issue of copyright is universal, be it print, the literary world or the Internet. Most blogs are covered under the Creative Commons License that entitles use of content provided the author is attributed.

Ignorance is bliss?

In India, awareness levels on copyrights are alarmingly low. Many popular Indian news dailies credit trivia, jokes and light pieces to the “Internet.”

Anand Parthasarathy, Consulting Editor - Information Technology of The Hindu newspaper, feels that there is widespread misunderstanding about content usage on the Internet.

“People are not aware that web resources need to be credited. I have myself come across some websites and even books that have carried some of my articles in compilations, without my knowledge and without permission from the media house I work for.”

He feels that the problem is even more pronounced when it comes to regional language content.

“Content providers seem to be taking shortcuts to meet their requirements since they do not have resources of their own. Incidents like the Yahoo! case happen because of the complete ignorance of copyright issues,” adds Parthasarathy.

Blog and the Law

Indian Copyright Law may be complex, but is clear on one aspect. It recognizes blog entries, including recipes, as “literary works.”

“It is about giving expression to an idea in an original form,” says Pavan Duggal, Supreme Court lawyer and a Cyber Law expert. “For example, there is no copyright on a love story, whether Premchand or Shakespeare write it, but the style of delivery. In other words, the output can be protected. Anyone found guilty of infringing copyrights are liable for civil and criminal charges and can claim for compensation.”

Dr Sebastian Paul, an advocate and an expert on copyright issues, echoes the similar view and says that no stranger can make use of content in any manner without the explicit permission of the owner of the site.

“It does not matter whether it is printed matter or a website or a blog,” says Dr Paul, who is also a Member of Parliament from Kerala.

There may be some who feel that a huge hullabaloo is being raised regarding the Yahoo! issue about a few generic recipes that every housewife in Kerala would probably know. All said and done, the fact still remains that the content provider in question lifted sections of the recipes, including even a proverb.

“The owner (blogger) of the content (the recipe in the case of Yahoo!) is entitled to protect it and reproduction of this without attribution and written permission from the author is illegal,” Dr Paul adds. He is also a media critic and a member of the Press Council of India.

Duggal feels that Yahoo! being the Network service provider, is responsible for the content on its sites and not just the content service provider, in this case, Webdunia.

The Supreme Court lawyer says that a matter of copyright infringement involving a blog would be considered both a civil and penal offense under the IT Act. He reckons that while plagiarism is rampant, no one has filed a case since it is not perceived as a significant or important issue.

Na Vijay Shankar, another Cyber Law expert, suggests that bloggers would have to discourage such content theft by providing a notice explicitly stating that the content is copyrighted and reproduction and use for commercial purposes would be done only with the writer’s permission.

After CyberMedia News broke the Yahoo! story last week, a blogger wrote to this correspondent alleging Yahoo! has published as many as 12 cases of content including photographs and a poem, originally posted on blogs, minus attribution to the source.

Yahoo! said it is currently investigating this allegation and is expected to issue a statement on Thursday.

The copy-paste facility was not invented for the need of content in regional language, or so suggests this investigation.

(With inputs from Shashwat Chaturvedi in Mumbai)

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