Plagiarism update

News from the plagiarism front:

1. It's getting hotter by the day, and I want it to rain. I know this has nothing to do with plagiarism, but it's bloody hot mate.

2. K.R.Chandrashekar has "acknowledged sources on his web site". What this means is that he has said that:

I acknowledge the material I have borrowed from the Internet - news items, pieces of columns and articles.

And given a list of articles.

Rajeev Srinivasan is one lucky guy. He got ripped off thrice!

I'm still ticked off; this is still blatant copying and the authors don't get no say. It's not about just acknowedgements, it's about not getting the original author's "okay", about not giving them part of his proceeds, about my paying for what is effectively an irrelevant collection of internet material, and also about twisting the words around so they mean something altogether different.

Acknowledgements are one step forward. But Mr. Chandrashekar, you need to learn to give proper credit - meaning, don't twist their words, don't copy more than a couple sentences, and quote their NAMES in the book. You need to release a new edition with the changes, and recall the current one.

3. Minkey Chief is angry. He says, "Dai Deepak! Can you put your updates on separate blog entries? "

Deepak is sorry. Deepak has therefore bowed to the dictates of the Chief and dedicated an entire bullet point in his honour. And he's got a darn good web site.

4. Kaavya Vishwanathan is screwed. For those of you who don't know, she had written a book called "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life". She copied a large amount of content, with K.R. Chandrashekar-esque word-changing techniques, and got a $500,000 two-book deal with Little, Brown . (now called Little, Drowned) People weren't too happy when the found out that she'd copied from more than one author and perhaps from another Indian-American novel.

Kaavya admitted the plagiarism and apologised saying "The copying was unintentional", but believing that would involve a frontal lobotomy. Eventually, the publishers recalled the book and said ta-ta to the second book as well.

And now, a newpaper named "The Record" will investigate Kaavya's articles as an intern with them in 2003 and 2004. "We have no reason to believe there's anything wrong with her copy. But in light of what's going on, we thought we should check her stuff out."

It's a big bad world, isn't it.