SiliconIndia Stealing Content from Lighthouse Insights: Livebloggers Battle the Scourge of Plagiarism

Just under a day ago, I found an appalling phenomenon in my Facebook timeline – A leading online technology magazine focussing on the Indian domain, SiliconIndia, was caught stealing portions of a recent interview published by rising social media blog Lighthouse Insights.

Lighthouse Insights was started in late 2010 by Prasant and Vinaya Naidu with the aim of bonding the community of social media users. I first met Prasant at a meet-up in Pune, and instantly liked the knowledge he had built on the social media scene in India.

You can read the complete account of the theft in one of their posts.

Do News Sites Have the Liberty to Steal?

When the founders of Lighthouse Insights confronted SiliconIndia on Twitter, an incredibly shocking explanation appeared:

Only the most juvenile of writers could possibly put up such an explanation; I had to remind myself that this was emerging from a well-established media organization that has been around since 1997. The tweet was subsequently deleted, but it was too late as it was retweeted several times and its screenshot began to float around on Facebook.

The founders of Lighthouse Insights decided to battle it out on Twitter to expose the high-profile content thieves after appeals to their CEO and content managers fell on deaf ears. The complete blow-by-blow description of the fight has now appeared in a new blog post on their site.

The battle-cry hashtag #OccupySiliconIndia began to pick up momentum during the early part of the 14th of August, and hit the list of top ten trending hashtags in India by evening. That forced SiliconIndia to sit up and take notice, offering Lighthouse Insights either of two options, of providing due credit, or removing the copied post completely.

The result? The offending post vanished while supporters of the campaign continued discussing possible outcomes. The fight isn’t over; after receiving a bloody nose, SiliconIndia have simply disappeared from the scene instead of announcing an unconditional public apology for the theft and the subsequent distress caused to ardent followers of an insightful new social media blog.

The Scourge of Plagiarism and the Hope from Social Media

Plagiarism has been a perpetual enemy for writers and publishers ever since the introduction of the printing press in the Middle Ages. The matter has become much worse with the arrival of the Information Age, now that just a few keystrokes and mouse-clicks are all that one needs to lift thoroughly-researched material and claim its ownership.

Many web publishers conscious of the lurking thieves invest a significant amount of their time in filing Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) reports to get Google to de-index plagiarised content, but the cat-and-mouse game continues. Even when such reports are not filed or delayed, search engines are sophisticated enough to ascertain the real thieves. Unfortunately, webmasters may end up on the losing side when their sites are restructured or migrated to new domains, since such changes can confuse search engines.

The Wrath of the Connected World

Will social media come to our rescue? The signs are positive, with the victory of #OccupySiliconIndia – even after SiliconIndia decides to undertake major damage-control exercises, Lighthouse Insights is likely to present this story as one of the most potent case studies showcasing the vast power of social media. Publishers, no matter how big or small, must now realize the importance of original content and think twice before facing the wrath of the masses in a connected world.

What are your thoughts about the battle against plagiarism? Please feel free to use the comment form below and speak your mind!