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It has been not long back that Google made a move to acquire DoubleClick. This sent waves of different emotions through out the blogosphere and internet in general. Google has been grown to such an extent under such a short time, that it is faced with quite a varied palette of reactions for every action it takes.

And it was not long before Microsoft hedged to have the officials look into the Google DoubleClick acquisition under the scrutiny of Antitrust Laws.

Antitrust Laws in United States

Antitrust Laws in United States prohibits monopoly (or anti-competitive behavior) and condemns unfair business practices. The antitrust laws seek to protect the consumers. If a particular company is able to set itself in a monopoly position, it can change the prices and the supply at its own whim, since it is not driven to deliver quality service/products in order to compete with its competitors.

History Of Antitrust Cases

United States has seen its share of Antitrust cases filed against several companies in this decade.
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I stumbled across this topic, when I was researching the topic of Photoshop Vs GIMP.

Open Source software, be it operating systems like Linux, CMS like Drupal or graphic editors like GIMP, has most of the times been the poorer cousins of their commercial counterparts when it comes to features. Of course, there are cases where the Open Source alternative is way better than commercial ones (web servers for example), but they usually happen to be exceptions and special cases.

Open Source software is usually developed by volunteers - driven either for the purpose of giving to the community or scratching an itch. The Open Source software may be said to lack the coherence in developing a solution. It is this situation that marks the cue for entry of bounty.

Bounty, in the traditional sense, is something that are usually put on the heads of criminals. Bounty hunters chase them up, catch them, and they are rewarded the amount. A similar case happens in the world of Open Source and it is not that dramatic as things happening around Neo in Matrix.
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I thought I would not write about it again for quite some time, but I feel compelled to. It is about copyright owned by artists, writers and others over the works they have created; and about other people using it without permission. It also got a comment at Digg, stating that “copyright infringement is not stealing“. I had replied, stating my disagreement and left it at that.

Today, something else caught my eye. Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, had something to say on the act of copyright infringement being stealing. And I was amazed by the number of varied comments that he got. I was amazed, not just for the sheer quantity (it can be a good example for Web 2.0 phenomena) of user generated content, but by some of the absurd rationalizing that people did to justify the act of copyright violation.

I do not call it copyright violation - I call it stealing.

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I get up this morning. It is a nice Saturday morning that I planned to spend by lazing around and doing some good original work for Splat. And as always, I open my Thunderbird to check out the updates on my tracked feeds, and I find this post, Recurring Themes: Two Topics I Don’t Cover Now, by Jonathan Bailey at Plagiarism Today.

I am an Indian, and the other authors here are all Indians. There are instances where my friends would say that I am more a non-Indian than a Indian because I take some stances that speak of Universal Brotherhood or something along those lines. But yet, I identify myself as an Indian and I am proud of it.

But that post by Jonathan, evoked a response of anger on the post in me.

India is the world’s most populous democracy and a rising Internet power. However, it seems to have an unusually strong problem with plagiarism. This problem is echoed by colleagues of mine that teach high school and college in India as well as mainstream media reports .

How could he generalize?

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It is odd and weird when I see what a minority of people do - act without honor. They say that imitation must be taken as flattery but I do not know how I should be taking this.

This particular series of incidents happened by January end, and here is a summary of the things in a chronological order.

Short version

A person copied a blog post from Splat and used it as his own site without any attribution. When I asked the person to remove the material, I got no response, and hence I intimated Google Adsense on the issue. They were not able to wrestle the content down without a DMCA report. It was a bit of inconvenience for me to file a DMCA and hence I contacted the web-host of that site and was successful in removing the material.

Long version

The 10 step tutorial to create shiny ball vector art was posted on 13th of December.

A person, who identified as www.errorforum.com commented the post on 14th of December.

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I came to know of an alarming bill that was submitted in the US legislation through this post at Public Knowledge. I say it is an alarming bill because if the bill passes the houses and becomes a law then all the works of artists who reside outside United States, and in some cases even with in, would find themselves at loss.

The bill was introduced on May 22nd, 2006 in the Houses of Representatives, United States. It seeks to amend the Title 17 of United States Code that would allow for remedies in case the copyright owner cannot be found. The particular code gives the people the rights over their intellectual works.

After some research and opinions I have heard from others, I feel that it has profound implications, and that it would allow people to steal works of artists, musicians, and the like - and hide behind the clause that the intellectual work was an orphan work.

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