Pain of plagiarism

Earlier this year, we found an article on ST bed layout copied almost completely, (with some names changed) in an edition of City Plus, Dainik Jagran’s local freesheeter. The article byline was Joel Deepak. Our article written by Samuel Jacob, and published last year is here. We had been copy-pasted!

We sent a stern note to the editor, Sapna Khanna. She replied with an apology saying that the freelance writer no longer worked for them, and that they would issue a correction in their next issue.

We’re quite aware that in media, everyone watches everyone else. It comes with the territory and it’s a good thing. As long as it stops with watching, that is.

At Citizen Matters, we are particular about the quality of our articles and we value our writers’ work; If any media house wants to republish our article, we are happy to work with you. Our reprint/republication policy is here.

Recently, we have been coming across many sites, especially non-commercial blog sites that have displayed complete articles from Citizen Matters. Most of them do not even credit us as the source. Our request to all such bloggers – please don’t, you are doing a great disservice to the quality and diversity of online media.

This is what we recommend: Display a para or two from the article, thrown in a link to us, and write your own commentary and thoughts around it for your audience to read and react. Several bloggers are already doing this on CM’s articles.

Being a very small startup team, we don’t have the bandwidth to monitor whenever we are copied. You, our readers can help – let us know when you see something that looks like it has been taken from our publication without due credit.

Comments:

  1. Deepa Mohan says:

    Imitation (or copying) is the sincerest form of flattery, so this means CM is getting successful! 🙂

    I suppose you know that the first plagiarist was that ancient Chinese, A Ping….!

  2. Narasimha Vedala says:

    This brings me to the point of copyright laws. Do you know any authoritative books on Indian copyright laws? I would like to buy one.

    The website http://copyright.gov.in/ is useful to some extent but not in detail.

    “The Indian Copyright Act today is compliant with most international conventions and treaties in the field of copyrights. India is a member of the Berne Convention of 1886 (as modified at Paris in 1971), the Universal Copyright Convention of 1951 and the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement of 1995. Though India is not a member of the Rome Convention of 1961, the Copyright Act, 1957 is fully compliant with the Rome Convention provisions.”

  3. Aswin S says:

    copyscape.com

    You can search for copies of your page on the world wide web. 🙂

  4. Thejesh G N says:

    Have seen Big Media houses copying stuff from blog and they don’t even reply sometime.

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