Arun Bhat sent me a link to this piece in USA Today on folks who pass off other people's articles/ columns as their own on blogs/ websites. Del Jones observes..
The Internet is becoming a cesspool of plagiarism.
Steve McKee, a partner at Albuquerque advertising agency McKee Wallwork Cleveland, found that out in June after he wrote his monthly column for BusinessWeek.com.
The column, entitled "Five Words Never to Use in an Ad," was one of his more popular pieces. A search revealed that 36 blogs had picked it up and posted it to their sites, something that is usually considered to be fair use in the blogosphere. However, to McKee's annoyance, 13 of those took credit for writing it as their original prose.
"They're like cockroaches," McKee says. "Ideas are our assets, and it's frustrating when people take them from you without shame."
I fully agree. I've had some of my writing used by bloggers and little known websites without attribution or permission. It really sucks.
But wait, the USA Today article gets more interesting:
A July 3 column written for BusinessWeek by former General Electric CEO Jack Welch and his wife, Suzy, was posted on the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) site from New Delhi. There was no attribution to either BusinessWeek or the Welches, only a photo that appeared with the column of professor Arindam Chaudhuri, a business guru and best-selling author in India who works for IIPM.
When USA TODAY tried to contact Chaudhuri by e-mail on July 21, the e-mail was forwarded to Naveen Chamoli, dean of IIPM's Centre for Planning and Entrepreneurship. Chamoli e-mailed back saying that Chaudhuri was traveling, inaccessible and had nothing to do with the Welch column being posted beneath his photo.
Chamoli said in his e-mail that IIPM has rights to the Welch column through the New York Times News Service/Syndicate. Chamoli said in a subsequent e-mail that a Welch byline was added after the USA TODAY inquiry because, "others could be confused."
Jack and Suzy Welch, on vacation, had no comment.
All I can say is, while the internet enables plagiarism, it also makes it easy to identify a plagiarist. Someone, somewhere generally notices and tips off the original author. To fayda kya hua? Apni izzat mitti mein milane waali baat hai...
Hi Rashmi,
ReplyDeleteI could provide your blog's url to link to my RSS feed aggregator and now I get your blog posts in 'My Yahoo'. However I could not achieve the same for my blog.
Can you pls. provide me the info on how you got your blog feed enabled?
Sorry for the unrelated topic
Thanks and Regards,
Subu
i have it straight from the writers who work for his magazines. the articles therein are a mish mash of content from all sorts of sources. an odd word or sentence is changed around. not a single piece of original information there. hardly a surprise to read your post !!!
ReplyDeleteizzat hogi, tab mitthi mein milega na!
ReplyDeleteanyone who passes off someone else's work as their own - really can't have any sense of honour - can they?
Don't know why...but somehow I get the feeling that Mr Arindam Chaudhuri is like Saddam Hussein or Fidel Castro. His people blowing his trumpet and he shamlessly flaunting his "bateesi" smile..
ReplyDeletelike piracy, its tough to root out plagiarism...IIPM and Arindam has been doing much more than plagiarism for a while
ReplyDeleteArindam Chaudhuri and plagiarism are synonymous. I feel AC loves to be in the midst of controversies and I don't know where he gets his ideas from.
ReplyDeleteHope all would have seen the center page ADs he puts on the leading newspaper saying IIPM is this and that.. WHO CARES but the worst part he is able to strike chords with some gullible students..
PLS PLS save those students and AC is making great business in the name of management education ..He is minting money,making movies and now flicking ideas/transcripts/writeups etc from here and there and publishing a magazine..
Huh !!!!
I cannot understand,
ReplyDeleteIIPM spends something to the tune of a few crores every year on advertisements, why cannot they spend the same amount on infrastructure?
its funny actually the way these people have actually taken to the heart the fact you need to sell everything, its sad that we as a society are tending more and more towards selling and how things are sold, rather than improving performance which itself is the best marketing technique.
aditya
this kind of stuff happens all the time
ReplyDeletethe mistake Mr C made is that he copied from someone bigger than himself.
nobody would have cared if he had lifted from some XYZ...
some more course content for his "What they don't teach you at IIM"
ban gaya na ulloo.. apne chotli bhai ka.. kachra ho gaya ijjat ka.
ReplyDeleteWell, he has to do that. After all, how will he be considered a management guru.
the case of business today B-school survey and arindam choudhary low quality/copied content generation is same.
ReplyDeleteThe idea they have to generate enough popularity and mass recongnition which is served for whatever reasons it be.
So if he claims to be a management guru and all that without anybody else and others read, listen etc. only to criticize him, even then he has done his job for himself.
I do agree that blogging etc. has lead to a lot more plagiarism (a very well known Indian digital blogger copies the posts from other sites, minces with the words and is a super hit) - but Arindam chaudhary?
ReplyDeleteWell, given his earlier record of *thinking beyond IIMs*, I guess he has gone ahead and started copying all the materials from the net..
Now, someone needs to *think beyond IIPM*!!
Idea Labs
Your article and comments to it, are very good. I enjoyed them.
ReplyDeleteMr Choti cannot plan his own companies website and copies from here there..and look at his institute's name. I am not getting how he makes money? Who are the foolish people who pays him! Its funny of being caught red handed.You have to look carefully in his magazines also. I doubt many articles may be copied.
The fact that the IIPM administration did not show basic integrity even after being caught shows the hollow beneath the sheen. Nicely compiled blog, yet again!
ReplyDeletenot sure what being "amongst the toppers" means
ReplyDeleteas i understand, either he was the topper or he wasn't
and again why none of these "prestigious awards" rings a bell... had anybody heard of these organizations/awards before Mr C made them prestigious...
Arindam Chaudhari...how far he goes with such things...just amazing..We indians have the capacity to take lot of crap..I must say...
ReplyDeleteDear Ms. Bansal,
ReplyDeleteI think the "phoreners" have misunderstood our hero Mr. Pony Tail and it is a sad situation that you have followed the "phoren" example instead of defending a desi hero. You see, things like plagiarism are all a matter of interpretation and depend on the "law of the land". Now India is transforming and everything we have is world class, world class banks, world class accountants, world class healthcare (India is a medical tourism hub), world class technology (infosys, wipro), world class BPOs, and so on. Among these, the shining star is the world class management institute called IIPM, led by a dynamic personality Pony T. Now, in a dynamic country like India, a dynamic personality (PT) with a dynamic experience is creating dynamic knowledge to lead our dynamic youth to compete in dynamic global economy. Hence, my suggestion is that you should have a dynamic interpretation of dynamic Indian law and should not ruthlessly blame Mr. Pony T for a minor (dynamic) slip up on a dynamic web page...
Hail the dynamic pony and his tail!!!
Dr. Harangue-outang
http://neerajmohan.blogspot.com