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Yahoo says sorry for plagiarising cookery notes(The Times of India Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) BANGALORE: An angry blogger community in Kerala has forced an apology out of Yahoo for lifting half a dozen cookery notes verbatim from Kariveppila (curry leaves), an independent blog site by Suryagayatri, a Kannur-based housewife in Kerala. After the blogger community conducted strong online and offline protests, Yahoo was forced to post an apology on its regional website Yahoo India Malayalam. It was hardly a month ago that Yahoo started its Malayalam portal. The apology read: "Yahoo respects the blogging community and the etiquette followed. We regret inconvenience caused by the inadvertent posting of the recipe without attribution. Our regional content provider webdunia should have checked out the legal right for the reproduction of the content. We see it as a serious matter and have removed the content from our site. We as a company respect the values of the blogger community." Half a dozen online publications and two Malayalam newspapers had reported the issue. A couple of days ago, a large number of bloggers gathered in Thiruvananthapuram to observe an anti-plagiarism day. Bloggers said Yahoo has been copying from several Malayalam blogs and websites which were protected under Creative Common License, sans permission or credit line. In case of Suryagayatri's Kariveppila, Yahoo reshuffled or restructured some of the paragraphs while six of her recipes, including that of a gooseberry pickle, were copies word-for-word. Cyber law expert and supreme court lawyer Pavan Duggal said, "Our cyber law is weak and inadequate to tackle such infringements. It's definitely an ethical issue. Online violations are on par with offline violations. It's time people and enterprises changed mindset and behaved responsible." Copyright 2007 The Times of India. Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd. Source : Financial Times Information Limited |