It is hilarious what some people think about copying pasting on the web – They feel it is free reign to just pick up any content and use it on their web property. However, most of the times, it is an internet newbie that does these things.
But what will you say when a premier tech magazine in India does it? Not only does it do it, but defends it as well. Just check out this tweet from Silicon India guys:
The tweet clearly states that – Silicon India being a news site, they have the liberty to copy paste. To be honest I am dumb-founded by this response. As of writing this, Silicon India seems to have removed the above tweet, but you can check out the discussion on it here on facebook. I can also understand that the person who has tweeted this may not know heads and tails about plagiarism. Even then, it is a shame that Silicon India does not take care of what what has been spoken on their own official twitter feed.
The Background
Here is a quick walk-through as to what happened…
A Pune based Social Media site, Lighthouse Insights, had published an interview with Gautam Ghosh on completing 10 years of blogging. Parts of this interview was published by Silicon India (the article on this url has been deleted) in its entirety. Vinaya Naidu, Founder of LH Insights, put up a blog post explaining the plagiarized content and here is the excerpt of that.
Excluding the first two paragraphs (which obviously have been lifted from other source), the article starts with the introduction of Gautam Ghosh and a little excerpt from an article on Forbes, where author Shel Israel had interviewed Gautam tagging him as a ‘Social Media Thought Leader from India’.
This is the same excerpt we have displayed on our blog. How can two different content producers choose to display the same excerpt from a massive article? Besides, SiliconIndia did not even provide the Forbes interview link.
Everything in between quotes has been copied i.e. All of Gautam’s responses to us.
While a few sentences have been edited smartly, while conveying the same idea, two paragraphs were not tampered with at all!
Currently neither the tweet, or the article remains. The editorial team at Silicon India seems to have understood their mistake.
If it was me, I would expect a serious apology from Silicon India!
What do you think?