Mass Creative Commons Deed Violations by Indian Media
The Background
December 20th, 2009, Chennai:
I was invited to the EMS Janmasatabdi celebrations organized by Madras Kerala Samaajam, Chennai by my friend Sunil Krishnan [He have already published a report on the event using some of my photos in his Malayalam blog] together with my friend Saswat. Eminent media personalities like N Madhavankutty, Sasikumar, K. A. Johny and Communist leaders like W. R. Varadarajan [who was the then Chief editor of Theekkathir], Hon. minister for Education of Kerala, Comrade. M. A. Baby, Comrade. E.M. Radha attended the function. Though I didn’t get any “good photos” that day, I was happy that I was able to talk to a few of them personally. After I returned from the meeting, I processed all the photos and uploaded some to my Flickr account and contributed some of them to wikipedia articles. As I publish/share my photographs via a Creative Commons by-sa license [even this blog is licensed by the same license], anyone can use my photographs without my prior permission but conforming to the conditions as stated in the license.
Recent Developments
February 19th, 2010:
The CPI(M) central committee (former) member and (former) state secretary of CPI(M) of Tamilnadu, Comrade. W. R. Varadarajan went missing on February 11th 2010 and police is still searching for him.
The Problem
I was very much excited to see one of my work being used by a mainstream media. That excitement was short lived and gave way to an uneasy feeling. I wasn’t given the credit for my work. The copyright violation was first noticed in Mathrubhumi, then in Manorama. Later I found them in few other websites too. Here I have a list of them, and the link to the stolen content.
- മാതൃഭൂമി
- മലയാള മനോരമ
- Our-Kerala
- Asian Tribune
- Dinakaran
- Daily Thanthi
- Thatstamil [they have removed it now]
The Evidences
I have taken the screenshots of Google news page as well as the content page, as soon as I noticed the content theft and are presented over here. Click the image to see a bigger version.
- മാതൃഭൂമി
- മലയാള മനോരമ
- Our-Kerala
- Asian Tribune
- Dinakaran
- Daily Thanthi
- Thatstamil [they have removed it now and too lazy to upload the screenshot]
The Actions
I have mailed the respective editors/content managers about the matter and waiting for their reply/action. So far, only Thatstamil have responded positively by removing the said image.
Post Script
The photograph is the first result of the Google image search for the query “W R Varadarajan”, which made its way to the news portals. The content managers ignored the copyright warning by the Google as well as the notice on my flickr album.
When will the conventional media starts respecting the copyright and creative commons licenses? If I am right this is not the first incident of this kind.
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