In a country where Cyber Laws count for nothing and licenses are a joke, there was yet another breach of license, this time by telecom giant Vodafone Essar. The company recently used a font, known as Webrupee [we had covered webrupee when they launched], which was recently developed by two bright young techies from Pune, on their website and the blatantly changed the font name and removed the licenses (Apache version 2).
Screenshots of Vodafone font usage
All this is shameful because all these changes to the font were made knowingly and thus you can’t even call it an accident. It’s sad that deserving talent cannot get their due credit just so that an already burgeoning corporation may save a buck here or there.
And this is a country which is touted to be the IT hub of the world. Imagine what would’ve happened if someone used Vodafone’s logo, for their own profit, without acknowledging them. There would’ve been a massive lawsuit right there.
You know as they say, people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. I’m not trying to incriminate Vodafone for their breach of license but would rather have the spotlight on the bigger picture; with the recent success of the movie, "The Social Network" which treads along the lines of copying code and the likes, it wouldn’t make one bit of a difference if due credit was given to the deserving, not just in Vodafone’s case but in anyone else’s.
Even people who upload videos on Youtube, without the license, acknowledge the license holder’s rights and mention a bit here and there. Today, it’s Webrupee. Tomorrow, it may be your band’s song used in their advertisement. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
Credit goes to Aman Jain and Meher Ranjan (Creators of Webrupee) to finding it out.
Hat-tip by Amiworks and post written by Tanmay Jadhav
While I condemn the act by Vodafone of not giving credit, but “legally” I don’t think they are doing anything wrong. Apache License is a permissive license and allows anyone to modify and distribute the product and there is no requirement of the new product to keep the original license as well.