Yahoo! New entrant in the Plagiarists Arena

Portals. Vortals. You-name-it-what-als. India is the hot new market. Millions of young, trendy, hip, tech-savvy young people. So many eyeballs. New portals are being launched every day by both unknown companies, as well as corporates like Yahoo! Their main problem remains content. And where do they get it from? Other bloggers!

Have no idea what I am talking about? In a nutshell: Yahoo! India launched a Malayalam portal, subcontracted content development to Webdunia, who in turn scraped blogs for free. When the shit hit the fan, Yahoo! pointed to Webdunia saying the content was expressly authorized by the author of the story to publish it. The author, on the other hand, expressly denies any such thing.

And they stole images from non-Malayalam bloggers!

Yahoo! has chosen to place itself outside the domain of any liability and asks those whose rights were violated to follow up with Webdunia. The material appeared on Yahoo!'s property. Yahoo! needs to acknowledge their mistake and tell us, the blogging world, that they will not lift content without our prior permission on the zillion other regional and language portals they will be spawning for the Indian audience.

Stop Plagiarism! Stop Yahoo!

For more information, please visit Ginger and Mango.

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