Imagine this fictional scenario,
What do you do when you find a stuff you bought from Wal-mart is no good? Return the product to Wal-mart and get your money back, right? What if Wal-mart asks you to return those contents to its Chinese sub-contractors and say they are not responsible?
That would be hilarious, isn’t it? Yes, That’s exactly what Yahoo! has done.
Remember this post about Yahoo! India plagiarizing contents from bloggers?
How did Yahoo! and Yahoo! India respond? After trying to contact them through many methods, they give a reply after one week stating this:
The Malayalam story was provided to us by Webdunia.com (the content provider) on the express representation that they are duly authorized by the author of the story to publish it. In the circumstances therefore, we do not admit of any copyright violation, as alleged by you.
Although there is no copyright violation and without prejudice to our rights, the said story has been removed from our web site, to avoid any further controversy.
Should you have any further concerns on copyright violations, please write in to copyright@webdunia.com and it will be addressed by the webdunia team.
Great! So, now we need to go behind every subcontractor Yahoo! or Yahoo! India does business with. Who are they trying to fool? Do they think we bloggers are stupid and do not understand the basics of copyrights and responsibilities?
The plagiarized content appeared on Yahoo domain, not on WebDunia.com domain.
The plagiarized content appeared on Yahoo! India (Malayalam) Portal and not on WebDunia.com Malayalam Portal
Blogs are an individual person’s voice, free of corporations and money. Cheating bloggers by plagiarizing contents should not go unanswered, especially by giant corporations like Yahoo!
Yahoo! or Yahoo! India is answerable and they need to acknowledge what they have done. They owe the bloggers an unconditional apology. We are not going to be cowed down by irresponsible corporations. If we do not protest now, incidents like these will threaten a common mans blog existence in future!
What happened to good business practices and good will?
See more links regarding this news:
- Digital Inspiration
- DesiPundit
- Global Voice
- WebPro News
- Aloo Techie
- WatBlog.com
Thank you all for your valuable support and if you would like to join this campaign, create a post about this on your blog and join us. (Thank you mallugirl for the idea)
Humor: I am launching another portal, copying contents from Yahoo! India's portal and blame it on my 10 year old little brother. Recipes don't have copyrights you see, according to 'yahoo'!
Note: A new blog by Malayalam Bloggers Community for this cause.
Feb 16, 2007
Yahoo! plagiarizes contents and blames it on subcontractors
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19 comments:
I don't know why they are acting like this! very bad.:(
Joining hands...
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Another Idea:
Cant we make an e-mail, with all those screen-shots, a message and all... then send it to as many as possible. Then it will be get forwarded to many others, and so on. Also provide links of all related blogs, so that the readers (mail) may respond.
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I have been thinking about this.. What if we all food and non-food bloggers do a silent protest against yahoo by doing a event post on the same day. Like we do a post on JFI we select a day call it anti-copying ( for lack of better word) day and all of us make a post against copying and all of us make a list against our known cases... Also would be a kind of blog-bandh ?? Give it a thought.. Ofcourse count me in..
I'm in. Will look for updates.
Thats a great idea revathi and mallu girl too said the same.
We need to spread the word. Will post about it soon. We have given Yahoo 4 business days to respond. We will see after that.
this is ridiculous.. now i feel we really should take a stand on the same day. These people can just avoid accepting responsibility and pretend its all fine.yahoo can't do this being such a big company.
inji, do i have permission to post your article (with due credits) in my blog?
bee
"What do you do when you find a stuff you bought from Wal-mart is no good? Return the product to Wal-mart and get your money back, right? What if Wal-mart asks you to return those contents to its Chinese sub-contractors and say they are not responsible?"
Not a right example.
If you go back and say "hey, the content in here is my manufacture being sold on someone's name, Wal-mart would obviously say - Please contact the Chinese sub-contractor"
So, is there a legal issue in copying the contents of a blog without the blogger's consent?
I know it is not right, but I want to know if there is any law for it ?
Dear "whats"
Why dont you please consult a lawyer and check about the "laws" please.
Ok,
This is what I personally believe. Big corporations like Google and Yahoo get content from various sources. Some content is received from portals like webdunia.com.
It would have been mistake on part of Yahoo if they did not remove the content after you have complained. But the fact is that they did, and that shows Yahoo respects your opinion. They also pointed you to the right source of problem.
Now if you want to continue protesting with Yahoo, while not addressing the actual content stealer, then I would not find it fair.
Dear Balu,
What is not fair is we bloggers asking WebDunia since the content was not on Webdunia's. That’s not fair. How can we even ask Web Dunia? They could easily say
1) It is not on our portal
2) Show us the evidence on our portal
What would we say then? We cannot even accuse them of anything. Thats not fair to me.
Yahoo! took down the contents which clearly show their guilt. They should also say a Sorry, that’s all we are asking.
Corporations create all these laws to protect themselves whereas individuals like us do not have that luxury. So when corporations themselves commit grave mistakes like these, they ought to at least provide an apology to the bloggers.
Even if you accidentally stomp on a person's feet, you would say Sorry - wouldn’t you?
Yahoo! portal now states that the content is sourced by WebDunia. Did you not see this yet ?
Ralminov,
Yes, I saw that. Thats now after all this.
However, their copyright link shows to write to Yahoo not to WebDunia. Let them change that too!
I saw a link to this post on Foodies Hope. Its shocking to know these kinds of things happen at corporate level. I just thought some silly shameless people do such things. This is kind of heart breaking too.
What if the victim of such theft never finds out? There are so many websites out there..anyone could be stealing your content.
hi everybody,
though i am not a blogger, i do visit blogs, especially the indian food blogs literally everyday.
The amount of effort all of u guys have put into your blogs is absolutely evident, and i have always appreciated and wondered at your passion that keeps you going in spite of all your busy lives.
i have been following all of this plagiarism which has been occuring over the past. this is definitely indeed a gross thing to do, and we should definitely protest and ask for a formal apology.
i extend my support to the cause and kudos to all your determination.
if there is a post or writeup like a non blogger like me could do, pls do tell me. i think all bloggers across the world would be joining hands in this.
hats off to all of you
sangeetha
Hey Injipenne,
I too want to protest.It is unfair that they do this. Yahoo must apologise. The law is also applicable to 'Big Wigs' as my teacher calls them. I'll also put in a post in my blog early.
this is really strange. i totally agree with inji that y! is responsible. if you were to sue y!, y! alone would be held responsible,... after that yahoo could sue the content provider on their own time.
im no lawyer and this is my humble opinion...
perhaps you can find a lawyer who may want to battle it out against yahoo probono...
sue them
Hmm, i think it is the problem with a lot of other indian portals too. I recently found an article in sify about 'Detroit Auto Show' lifted word for word from wikipedia and it was featured in the front page of sify too.!! What does these cheap journalists think? that they are getting paid 20k or 30k a month just for cutting and pasting from other places in the net?? I wrote to sify feedback and they replied they have forwarded the email to the appropriate department. I dont know what happened to the journalist though?
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