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.
Blogposts