New Delhi: On a February morning, Srinidhi Hande went out to the Marina Beach in Chennai for a group run. He ran a little, and then he took some photos for his blog, including one of a parked police car.
On 26 September, Hande saw that photo again—published without credit in the local edition of The Times of India. “I was reading the newspaper, and it looked familiar,” Hande says. “Then I realized it was my image. It matched, pixel for pixel.”
Hande’s photo isn’t difficult to find; it’s the first one that Google Images returns for the words “Chennai police car”.
A screenshot of Srinidhi Hande’s blog, and the photograph that was used by ‘The Times of India’ without his permission.
The sheer ease of finding pictures online appears to have begun to tempt Indian publications into reaching illegally for photos on blogs and online albums such as Flickr. These photos are mostly published without permission, due credit, or compensation—copyright infringement, in legalese.
Within the community of Indian bloggers, a sense of outrage has begun to organize itself into a movement against this trend of plagiarism. Blogger Sudipta Chatterjee called for a “blogathon” on 2 October, Gandhi’s birthday, asking bloggers to vent about the issue to raise awareness.
Another blogger, Dilip Muralidaran, has begun documenting instances of plagiarism on a blog called, unflinchingly, “Indian Press Are Thieves,” and he has started copyright consciousness workshops. Hande is launching an online petition, and says he is determined to embed watermarks in his uploaded images: “Times Of India, please do not copy this image.”
While The Times of India takes the bulk of such complaints, bloggers have also accused other publications such as the Hindustan Times, and vernacular newspapers such as the Ananda Vikatan and Kumudam, and the erstwhile Air Deccan in-flight magazine SimpliFly.
Asked about these allegations, Rahul Kansal, chief marketing officer of Bennett, Coleman and Co. Ltd, publisher of the The Times of India, says the newspaper is cracking down.
“Unfortunately, this is one of those things that newspapers have gotten used to doing and has acquired some sort of legitimacy by conventional practice,” says Kansal. “We definitely don’t want to exploit India’s traditionally lax intellectual property rights regime, and we are working to weed this practice out completely.”
Still, he adds: “What happens is that there are websites that aggregate these images and say they are free for download and use. Some instances have come to our attention, and we have told our editors to be very careful and put an end to this practice.”
Hande says that he attempted to contact The Times of India in Chennai in multiple ways—through email, people he knew, and the main telephone number. But he made no progress. “I felt (it was) no use trying to contact them,” he wrote on his blog.