Tuesday, 6 June 2006

Whoopdidoo. We have been internalised too.

We're a member of an interesting online forum called Creativegarh. Sometime in February, a gentleman called Yogesh Goel wrote to the group thusly:
Hi all at CREATIVEGRAPH,
I am back with my latest project. Well this time i am not alone. I have along with me my friends Kuldip & Vivek. We are working on a blog or say a project and we need ur contribution. Its all about WEBSITE REVIEWS. And i hope you all tech savy people will not dissapoint us this time.

Here is the link-

http://zeroin.wordpress.com/
(We're only quoting the first part of that mail, but members of the forum—and yes, it's worth a look-see if you're not—can see the entire text here.)

Mr Goel's post interested us. We're always desperately hunting for interesting sites to cover. So we bookmarked him for a rainy day. Which, coincidentally, came around last week. We'be been thinking that in addition to the regular 'blog of the week' we already do, perhaps we could add a 'community / forum of the week.'

Whaddya know? The chap has lifted entire sections of the column and posted them under his own name. (His signature line, by the way, reads "I AM THE SOURCE - I AM THE 'BAADSHAH'" in bright red all-caps. Heh.)

Here's an example: this, this, this and this are all straight lifts from one column.

We haven't gone through the forum in great detail - these caught the eye because he even used our words as his subject lines - so we really don't know if he's ripped off even more stuff.

Not a word of attribution, of course, though the mail quoted above also says:
- You can send the link and we will review them. The credit of sending the link will be urs.
- You can send a link as well as the review of the website or the
webpage. We will publish with your name.
We're hugely flattered that Mr Goel approves of our selections, and we wouldn't dream of stopping anyone from linking to the sites we review, though if he were to do so, write his own reviews and say upfront that he thought his were better, we'd have some respect for the gentleman.

But wethinks it's a bit much when the chap lifts our entire copy and passes it off as his own, what?

5 comments:

Soosixty said...

Hello. I sometimes read your blog. Via Samit. But how did you reach mine? Thanks for visiting, and please come again :)

Anonymous said...

Plagiarism. Not again. Yawn :)

Shilpa Bhatnagar said...

Ooh! welcome to the club! Now for some flame and knife throwing at the offender..*rubs hands in glee*

Unknown said...

Hi Peter,

How about sueing the guy for copyright infringement?

J

Anonymous said...

hi,

i am the said Yogesh Goel.

just chanced upon this article today and found what have i done....i am extremely sorry for whatever is done and said....i apologise for each and every wrong thing done from and by me....it won't happen in future at anycost....

well, that was all done in hurry...
and now we don't work on that anymore....thanx for analysing things so closely....

thanx a ton again...
i realise what i have done...

regards
Yogesh