When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web he came up with a concept: a way to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. Did he think of plagiarism and copyrights violation? The Internet was born in North America. Europe gave birth to the Web. In Asia, people can do a lot of things in term of catching up with new tech and tools, not to mention the most famous ‘copy and paste’.
Video-sharing site YouTube is lately facing lawsuit as The English Premier League is not very happy with the misappropriated its intellectual property by encouraging footage to be viewed on its popular site. One of the most interesting points is that Google-owned YouTube says the suit threatens the Internet.
Yesterday, Bernard Krisher launched a new attack on Khmer Intelligence (aka KI-Media), a Web site dedicated to publishing sensitive information on Cambodia. The Cambodia Daily publisher initially took some technical steps to identify the owner of the domain www.khmerintelligence.org. In the issue 92 of his English newspaper, a full page is about a reward announcement to anyone who can provide some important information that help his news organization to obtain compensation from Khmer Intelligence.
The first accusation made by Bernard was way back to September last year. It both astonished and surprised many people in town. I’ve been wondering are computer workstations at the Cambodia Daily office running free open source software or what?
Also, an international digital citizen at ‘Details are Sketchy,’ a blog about all things Cambodia, headlined the story ‘Bernie Krisher vs. Khmer Intelligence‘:
Last September, Bernard Krisher accused a handful of high-profile personalities and news agencies of intellectual property theft. In a full page ad in the Cambodia Daily, Krisher named names — Radio Free Asia, Sam Rainsy, The Catholic Church in Australia, Nexis, Factiva and Malaysia’s Bernama News Agency. He promised more ads to come, with “examples of the crimes of these organizations.”
With OCR-capable scanner (Optical Character Recognition), anyone can easily make a copy of typewritten text into machine-editable text. The first attempt of inventing new technology is to solve people’s problems. And of course, to create new problems.
As young Cambodians take only a few minutes to create a new weblog (aka blog), it is very important to think about a new phenomenon. These people spend time reading online news. Not most of them react to news in way of commentary, but replication. They perhaps thought that some news articles so important and want to help the mainstream media to spread the information without knowledge of copyrights matter. Of course, web link is the Internet nature. Linking makes the other side happy, why not use it?
Let’s try to think about another point. Is it really a good idea to develop Cambodia’s most popular Web site by gathering content from other sources?
Quoting a few sentences of materials from other sources is not plagiarism, as long as you acknowledge the information’s source. I believe bloggers are hungry for traffic, yeah quoting a few sentence with a link back would make both party happy.
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