Since ages technology has kept on making it easier to share information. From Gutenberg’s press to current day blogs it has become easier to record something and share it with others. The Internet is especially powerful in this regard. The Internet in general and Web 2.0 in particular have made it easier for content creators to become content publishers. However safeguards, both hard and soft, that exist in traditional media are non-existent or weak in the real world.
10 years ago it was probably more difficult for a photographer to share his work with the world. But this automatically made it more difficult to copy his work. Today any photographer, even a super-amateur, point-and-click, smile-please, photographer like me can have a dedicated Flickr stream 
But with the ease of sharing also comes the ease of copying.
Case in point – the great Times of India using Twilight Fairy’s picture without her permission. And when she brings this up with the editor no apology is forthcoming, the discussion about compensation stops at the low figure of Rs 1500 and Twilight Fairy is asked to sue or shut up. Nice going TOI!
By its very nature online media is more “free”, more free than traditional media in the sense that creating content, publishing content, accessing content, all are much easier (cheaper) than traditional media. Preventing plagiarism, technically, is usually not possible and all schemes will fail sooner of later. The only way to reduce plagiarism is for at least the biggies to be ethical and for the law and government to make it easier to prosecute and penalize copyright violators.
Sigh. TOI used to be my favourite daily around 10 years ago. But is has been steadily going downhill ever since, so much so that I stopped reading it years ago.
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Excellent piece! This is absolutely scary for the newspaper industry as well. Everybody aspires for their articles, photos and art to be published in major newspapers or magazines. With a scenario where their work is being stolen by these papers themselves, papers will rapidly begin to lose not only their credibility but there will also be a loss of creative drive.
Heard from a friend about the TOI stunt, and not very surprised to be honest. Has Twilight Fairy considered taking her story about copyright infringement to a competing newspaper/TV station? A no holds barred battle between the media giants is all that’s lacking
@Prude – Thanks
I agree with you about the erosion of credibility of newspapers… but that has been happening in so many different ways, not just plagiarism that I do not think it surprises me any more.
@AV – I think reporters from various media houses know about this incident but I am not sure if any of them will take this up in a serious way. But this is nothing new… check out all the links in this DesiPundit linkpost – http://www.desipundit.com/2008/09/03/times-of-india-steals-from-blogger/
Great site to watch new moon online
A few years back I also had the Ahmedabad Times (of the TOI group)
use a photo of mine from Flickr without permission. Funny that I
even found out as I live in New Zealand, but had come to Ahmedabad
to celebrate Uttarayan and there it was (from my Uttarayan image
set). I was pretty reasonable as my photos are registered on CC
licenses and said they could compensate by running 2 of my
Uttarayan photos with due credit over the following days. They said
thank you and yes… but when they didn’t follow through I sought
payment in cash which they gave. But it reflected badly on them
that they had so blantantly used an image without following correct
procedures which could have allowed them to run the image for free.
Worth noting though is that foreign newspapers don’t pay much for
photos…. when I shot for the Guardian I got paid around Rs 2000
per image.
Great post dude. Please post more of this kind of posts..
//IndiaRock
I adore Twilight! I can’t wait for Twilight Eclipse! I’m so in love
with Taylor Lautner, lol. I still find that the first film was
better, but New Moon def. wins in eye candy lol