Whose IPR is it anyway?
Raju Narisetti -
Saturday, October 18, 2008 11:49 AM
If it weren't such an egregious violation of the Indian Copyright Act of 1957, there would be delicious irony in the fact that India's
National Knowledge Commission, a high-level advisory body to the Prime Minister of India created with the objective of transforming India into a knowledge society, including
“reforming the country's Intellectual Property Rights system,” and an activist environmental group prone to pointing fingers at misdeeds of others were the ones ripping of Mint content.
It all began with a colleague stumbling upon a rather familiar looking article at www.indiaenvironmentalportal.org.in, one of a series of web portals set up by the Knowledge Commission and aimed at becoming “a decisive tool in the popular movements in support of the right to information, decentralization, transparency, accountability and people’s participation.”
This particular one is outsourced and managed entirely by Center for Science and Environment, the New Delhi-based activist public interest organization run by Sunita Narain and, perhaps, most famous perhaps for its populist battles over contaminated Coke and Pepsi in India. (Listen to that saga here)
Turned out that the article was actually a complete reproduction of Mint National Science Writer Seema Singh’s 10 September piece headlined "India’s low-cost patient care earns plaudits in US Study.” A closer look at the CSE-run portal then showed that it has been regularly copying/reproducing a large number of articles published in Mint without ever bothering to have sought permission from HT Media Ltd, which owns all of Mint content, for permission to use that content.
I don’t know about you, but I have never believed in giving away content for free. And, especially in India, where content is already being sold for next to nothing. Readers of this blog would already be familiar with the Romantic Realist’s pet peeve of how Indian newspapers, which typically cost Rs8 in just ink and paper costs for 24, all-color pages and not counting any content generating costs, are typically sold for Rs3 or less. Sure my job as editor isn’t to make money but to spend it, but we all know why money matters.
What is troubling to me is the attitude of CSE, which presumably gets a fair amount of money to manage this portal, to intellectual property rights. In the terms and disclosures portion of the portal, CSE acknowledges what it is doing and warns subsequent users of the portal in this way:
The India Environment Portal also makes available content produced, owned or controlled by other organizations or institutions, and which may be protected under various national and international copyright regimes by the providers of the content. Users shall abide by the relevant copyright notices, information, or restrictions contained in any Content accessed through the Service (including, but not limited to news articles, feature articles, opinion pieces, book abstracts, e-documents, photographs, images, illustrations, audio and video clips, also known as "Content").
But, apparently, when it comes to CSE’s own behavior in illegally copying other people’s content on to the portal, copyright protections don’t seem to matter. And this is an organization whose executive board includes B.G. Verghese, former editor of Hindustan Times and Indian Express, as well as a member of the Press Council of India whose duties include protecting the interests of Indian newspaper industry.
That all this is being done for the government’s Knowledge Commission in the interests of “comprehensive public access to information” doesn’t make the theft of Mint’s IPR any less of a crime. To me, this isn’t about ideology. It is mostly about Mint’s ability to fund its content generation efforts (salaries of reporters, editors.) Let me explain where I am coming from.
All of Mint’s content is provided for free on our website livemint.com. The idea behind a free website is that it will then attract a lot more eyeballs than perhaps a paid site. A lot more eyeballs then allow those at Mint responsible for paying for all this content generation—aka the advertising department—to attract more paying advertisers to the site. But, if HT Media is stuck with just paying for content while the content is stolen by freeloaders who get the eyeballs to their site, it prevents a media organization from generating revenue (and profits), which, in turn, hurts an editor’s ability to keep asking for ever more money to expand my reporting and editing efforts.
I am also quite aware that journalists and media houses are often accused of copying, especially from the internet. The accusations can often be true as well, as was clear from this article that ran on the front page of Mint recently about how Indian newspapers and magazines “steal” images off web sites. (Read article here).
And I am sure there could be people out there getting a bit bent out of shape by now about the fact that the government’s purpose in putting myriad pieces of information on one portal is noble, even if its means aren’t. But that is why we have laws that govern our behavior and here is what the Copyright Act of 1957 means in this particular context:
No special protection is granted to the Government, if the act (stealing IPR) complained of does not come within the purview of section 52 of the Copyright Act. In view of the flagrant reproduction of numerous articles of Mint, no provision under section 52 of the Act, dealing with fair use, can come to the government’s rescue and, therefore, the reproduction of the Mint’s articles amount to infringement of copyright. Under section 52 of the Act, no exemption is provided if an article is reproduced for the purpose of imparting/sharing knowledge with the public. Additionally, it is the exclusive right of the copyright owner (HT Media) to communicate its work to the public.
Mint routinely gets requests from other sites and publications seeking permission to use an article or two that staffers have published. With some exceptions, usually when such requests come from for-profit organizations, we are more than happy to grant one-off use of such Mint content. If, as claimed CSE and the Knowledge Commission's desire is to provide access to related information in one place, why can't they simply give links on the portal to other
free sites instead of stealing content? Or if they want to legitimately get Mint content, then seek so-called syndication rights.
When government bodies and self-appointed guardians of right and wrong behavior in our society openly break the law, there ought to be consequences. Saying the content was identified as a Mint story doesn't cut it. Nor does a "sorry we will take your content out now that you have complained."