Mid-day Bangalore steals content from WATBlog! - Plagiarism at its best!
Well i was shocked when one of our readers commented on our Reliance Chintee.com post saying whether we had any arrangement with Mid-day Bangalore to provide them content. I replied to the comment asking our reader to send us a screenshot of the newspaper as i felt it could be a case of plagiarism! And guess what my fears were found to be bang on! So much so that every word has been ripped off even the brackets and punctuations! from our article on chintee.com with absolutely no credit to WATBlog.com!!! Ok we are flatterred that Mid-day thinks that our work is great enough to be stolen, word to word but i obviously am not flatterred at their utter disrespect by having given no credit or the fact that we have a copyright statement on our blog which explicitly states that you need to take our permission to republish our articles. If this was the USA id sued them for sure and im sure id make a few millions in the process!! :) Unfortunately its India and we are just a group of bloggers, which is a community that seems to be in the minority (I am inviting bloggers to stand up, support us and prove me wrong on the minority bit).
Here is a screenshot of the article in mid-day bangalore. (printed on 30th May)
Here is a screenshot of our Chintee article (Posted on 28th May)
The article is edited by Sunayana Suresh who has had the audacity of stealing each and every word (except the headline.. thanks for that huh..) from WATBlog (Talk about modern journalism of cut copy paste! And bloggers are accused for writing inspired posts from offline media!)
.gif "sunanya suresh the thief")
WATBlog action:
This is what WATBlog plans to do.
a) I have informed sunayana from mid-day about this and i am awaiting their reply based on which i plan to take further action.
b) Though we dont monetise WATBlog through ads I strongly oppose anybody stealing our work and articles without giving us credit. For the same reason I am initiating a blogging council for India which i feel is the best way to tackle both online and offline plagiarism from blogs. This council is open to all bloggers. Please join and empower the council. The details of the council and the joining criteria has been given here. Hoping this small initiative from us goes a long way in making sure bloggers efforts are not undermined by acts like this one by Mid-day!
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I am amazed with this !! This is complete fake journalism, one's hard work must be appreciated by linking attribution.
It was wrong on the part of Mid-day journalist to copy the entire article without permission.
In addition, the posting of the article in this site itself had some grey areas about attribution to the source of the article.
On April 17, 2007 Startup Dunia posted about
Chintee based on a tip from Guarav
http://www.startupdunia.com/2007/04/17/chinteecom-another-reliance-venture/
On May 18, 2007 information madness posts an article on Chintee citing Startup Dunia as the source
http://www.informationmadness.com/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=164&Itemid=49
On May 28, 2007 WATblog posts an article on Chintee with links to Information Madness, but without explicitly mentioning the source.
Pranav of Startup dunia asks for appropriate attribution about Chintee.
On May 28, 2007 Alootechie Posted an article on chintee citing Information Madness as the source.
http://www.alootechie.com/news/2464.asp
On May 30, 2007 Mid-day uses the same content available on Watblog without permission.
@ Ravi - The article was posted by Arjun who had read the information first on information madness and had chosen to link to informationmadness. And many bloggers link words like "article" or "so and so said" to link to the source and arjun did exactly that. The reason arjun did not attribute the source to startupdunia is because he did not read it there. Also The article on WATBLog was completely original without a word being copied from anywhere so i disagree our article had any grey areas.
Very Ugly stuff… Journalism… My foot…. I do hope you get a chance to sue mid-day
I have been following this site for quite sometime now…
Looks like watblog has a bunch of jokers who are trying to use the Reliance brand name to get noticed.
What you guys are doing is not original at all.. WatBlog focuses on only 2 things..either it is ALEXA stats.. or some or the other Reliance services.
Do something different guys.. dont behave like CUT PASTE ARTISTS. You talk as if you have broken some exclusive news.
The Reliance 'chinti' news that you were talking about was all over the place.
I agree Mid-day should have given you jokers some credit.
@WATblog Reader - Firstly Thanks for calling yourself a WATBlog reader! That in itself is a reward for jokers like us.. And im glad that you agree we should have been given credit :). On the fact that we overuse alexa and publish a lot of reliance.. well we love feedback and we have made a note of what you have mentioned. But still i would request you to go through watblog again. We use alexa as one of the metric (Coz there aren't many others available) and as far as reliance is concerned we are HONEST in our reviews about them. Also please make a note dear WATBlog reader WATBlog doesn't put ads or earn any revenue from running WATBlog so we may be a bunch of jokers but we are jokers who are passionate enough about this space to continue contributing in our own small way. Thanks again for your comment we appreciate it. And we hope you remain a watblog reader for life! :))
I am up there to support Bloggers, I have few journalist friends as well, I am going behind it.
Cheerz
http://srinix.wordpress.com
Why would you be following jokers?
I think you follow them because of their awesome content and are simply jealous of their abilities.
Very Shocking !
Plagiarism at its very best.
Daksh
http://themarketingblog.wordpress.com :))
This is really unfortunate. You're right. We do need some legal protection in place for bloggers. Do update us on when you hear from them.
Yes,
This reflects poorly on Mid-Day. They should have attributed the source.
amit
An article i wrote was published without credits.. I did post it elsewhere after that..
Some lame reason was given saying they INSTRUCTED the EDITORS to add my name but apparently didnt.. And the article was horribly disfigured!
Do you get permission from Mid-Day before you posted that copy of hte article?
Anyway, welcome to the world of the Internet. Everything is free. India has one of the worst piracy records for IP and software in general. I am not sure why you are outraged. Plan on all your content being stolen. Now how can you still get people back to your site? THAT is the key.