Cut-copy –paste....who cares?

http://www.cybervictims.org

Recently I met some young fresh college students who were preparing for their assignments. When they showed me the topics, I could not hold back my surprise and also appreciation. The topic was about new findings on astro-physics and they had to contribute from their own understandings. When I asked them what do they think about it, almost all of them answered that ‘internet will think for us’. Apparently they were planning to spend some days in the net- searching and then put the results of the same in the assignments. But the question is how far these contributions would be original? A faculty in a local college told me ‘no wonder, none of them write from their own’. It is no surprise to me too. Last year, I got to see one of my own write-ups on cyber crime against women, neatly cut and pasted in a scholarly article which came for submission to a noted journal. The editor somehow sensed something wrong and alerted me.

But I am not alone in this “stolen and victimised” group. There are many noted as well as upcoming scholars whose works are being used without proper citation or acknowledgements by others. Either such people do not know about copy right violations, or they care a hang about these. But what no one understands is, more than violation of certain legal terms, it victimises the original creator.  A simple blog full of genuine creativeness may take minimum two days time to materialise; whereas a full length scholarly paper may take minimum three months to maximum five months time to be written to the expectations of a standard journal. Indeed, the cost of  heavy weight books may not be afforded by many, and these open access informative write ups not only help people (especially students) to fill up the vacuum, but also they help them to finish off their works in record times. Just “search” and you would get the answers even at the odd hours of midnight. But it no way means that one can use these sources as mugging up knowledge to pour over in the assignments or projects. It is unfortunate that in India among the high school and undergraduate students, awareness regarding copy right violation in relation to such ‘references’ is hopelessly low. A striking reason for this could be that the law meant for copyright protection in India, has given much weightage  to literary, dramatic, musical works, architecture, computer programmes, films, photographs etc.  Scholarly works, which include short write-ups also, fall much in the kitty of the publisher/s  who choose to publish them. Authors of such works therefore in many cases become secondary copyright holder, or may not have the copyright at all, but confers the right to their publisher/s.   However, the same may not be the case when the write up is published in the world wide net. While independent bloggers using Google services, or independent writers using other web-pages hosted in the US, are hugely protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA irrespective of their nationality, in India, the law is little tricky in this regard.   Section 3 of the Copyright Act, 1957 makes it clear that ‘publication’ means “making a work available to the public by issue of copies or communicating the work to the public”. This very definition apparently gives an indication that once a write-up is “floated” for public viewing, it is published. But the very next section, i.e, section 4 warns people that when such ‘publication’ is made without the author’s proper ‘license of the owner of the copyright’, it would be considered not published in the eyes of law. The conjugated inner meaning of these two sections lies in the fact that even if the work is ‘published’, no individual is allowed to use the same as his/her own work unless the original owner properly authorises the other person to use it. In practise, this authorisation can be implied when one uses a write-up from an open access source after properly citing the author’s name, the title of the write-up, the place where it is published and the date when it was published. However, when the write-up is published with the note from the author that it can be reused only with the written permission from the author, the way of obtaining permission extends by personally approaching the author for his/her permission.

In India hardly any undergraduate student is actually aware or is told about this. I observed that this awareness of respecting other’s hard work slowly arises in some students by regular reading of other available reading materials; some learn this when their works are rejected by editors on the ground of plagiarism. But unfortunately the number of these awakened individuals is very less. Largely, the education system is liable for this. In our schools we ask the students to produce exactly what is written in the text books; hardly any parent or teacher can spend time to make their wards understand what those scriptures actually mean. Many parents are never happy when they learn that their children are not taking up professional courses but prefer to be “thinkers”, or ‘researchers’; even when some land up in their dream courses, they are pressurised to produce some contributions towards the subject without being told how to do it on their own without ‘stealing’ other’s ideas. This gives rise to the vicious circle of infringement of copyrights and victimising the original authors.

Solution? Unless the ‘predecessors’/teachers/guides/parents show the way to be ‘innovative’, cut-copy-paste culture would happily exist in the land of unique thinkers and writers. Young students .......don’t victimise authors; respect their work, learn from them and show the world who inspired your work.

 Please Note: Do not violate copyright of this blog. If you would like to use informations provided in this blog for your own assignment/writeup/project/blog/article, please cite it as “Halder D. (2012), “Cut-copy –paste....who cares?

”, 29^th July,2012, published in http://cybervictims.blogspot.com/”