During her lengthy campaign, Sachar was told, by way of tenuous justification, that newspapers often used “free” Internet photos. It reinforces a common misconception that content on amateur blogs and Flickr is devoid of copyright protection, a misconception that Muralidaran is fighting to shatter.
Muralidaran, a software engineer in Chennai, has had his photos plagiarized twice, by a Tamil media house and then by a Hyderabad city portal.
In both cases, he doggedly pursued the matter until he became one of the very few complainants to extract a legal admission and levy a retroactive charge, known as a licence correction fee. (Under the terms of those agreements, Muralidaran cannot name the two media companies.)
“Publications cite fair use, but that only applies if they really have no other alternative, which is not true here,” Muralidaran says. “Even a lot of Creative Commons-protected content can only be used in non-commercial work. A newspaper is not non-commercial.”
Another misconception, held even by Muralidaran, is that soft copies fall outside the ambit of Indian copyright law.
“That isn’t true at all,” says Saikrishna Rajagopal, managing partner of law firm Saikrishna and Associates. “The Indian Copyright Act prohibits reproducing work in any material form, and that includes electronic form.”
Publications continue to steal images, Rajagopal says, because they get away with it. “They think nobody will take action,” he says. “If you can create a disincentive to infringement, so that if you’re caught, you’re made to cough up a substantial sum of money, then they’ll think twice.” (Saikrishna and Associates is outside counsel for HT Media on unrelated ongoing legal matters.)
But until courts are willing to award daunting damages in such lawsuits, and process them faster and smoother, Muralidaran’s brand of aggressive bluster may have to work instead.
“I called the publication and threatened to sell my equipment to bribe the police, have their offices sealed and their hard drives confiscated for cyber crime, then sue under Section 420 for fraud and also for sexual harassment,” he says. “That’s when they finally realised that I wasn’t going away.”
samanth.s@livemint.com