Good intentions: Internet - a paradise for Intellectual property thieves

With the lapse of the cyber crimes ordinance there is no way to deal with this problem in Pakistan.

KARACHI:

A friend of mine, Owais has a brilliant idea for a website. He is going to take all the news and articles published by Pakistani newspapers and gather them in one convenient place online for people to read; making a tidy sum of money for himself in the process using advertisements on the website. Sounds like a great service for the people too right?

It seems like a great plan, but Owais doesn’t realise that he is stealing. People like him are intellectual property thieves. They are using the original content that other people have created to make money for themselves.

Websites like the one Farooq is contemplating are called ‘Content Farms’ or aggregators; they are basically companies that do two things to generate traffic. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting readerpage views as first exposed in the context of social spam.

To do this, they either employ large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines. Or they resort to stealing other people’s intellectual property and putting it up on their website.

Intellectual property broadly refers to the creations of the human mind and Intellectual Property rights exist to protect the interests of creators by giving them rights over their creations, according to the World Intellectual Property Rights Organization (WIPO).

Using the intellectual property of others is a cyber crime. But the only law that deals with cyber crimes in Pakistan is gone and investigators dealing with cyber crimes have found themselves paralysed since the Prevention of Electronic Crime Ordinance (PECO) lapsed in November 2009.

The country doesn’t even have the ability to deal with incredibly serious cyber crimes like money and identity theft, it probably does not have the required infrastructure of laws to monitor people like Owais and keep him from stealing other people’s property. A senior official of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) says that this is like having their right hand cut off and left to deal with cyber crime in this paralysed state.

Two Pakistani content farms which are blatantly infringing on the copyrights of Intellectual Property Rights owners are Hamariweb.com and columnpk. According to experts, “Hamariweb’s business makes it about probably $1,000 per day or more, Maybe double that.” They weren’t sure about Columnpk but said that according to the Google’s advertisement policy, at least $500 a day minimum per site.

It is unlikely that these people can be sued and fined for damages given the lack of PECO, but it still might be possible under the ETO, said experts. But people are sure that they can be stopped from the content. Google is also usually open to banning the adsense accounts of IPO offenders, according to experts.

Blogs and websites copying content, cause the Intellectual property creators damage. In monetary terms as well as google rankings.

Everyone suffers from the issue, even bloggers. Aamir Atta, the editor of ProPakistani in an appeal to IP infringers said, “Gentlemen, the content provided to you is produced after tons of efforts and resources that we spend on it. We need some appreciation in return after you use this content, that’s our right.”

“IP violation destroys jobs and entire industries (look at Lollywood, our music industry whose only claim to hope is Coke studio). By stealing our content and making money off it, off somebody else’s hard labour, that’s just corruption and robbery pure and simple. And courts here of course are sclerotic,” said publisher of a daily newspaper in Pakistan.

He may be irked because he constantly gets mails from his team saying, “Please contact them and ask to cease and desist immediately. They are not sourcing us, the pics are ours and they are not linking back to our site (and they are removing all embedded links back to our site as well). They have ads on that site, so it is completely illegal to be making money like this.”

However, the editor of a very popular blog explains that the exact amount of losses that can be caused cannot be quantified.

“When it comes to websites/online content and copyright violation then estimates are usually hard to throw.” He said that his blog was being copied by well over 100 websites/blogs in Pakistan (those ranging from small blogs to large scale websites).

“Though I know at least dozen bloggers who lift my content (and from other websites) and are earning thousands of dollars.” The man has been successful in stopping a few bloggers from copying him by reporting them to Google, but he says that he eventually gave up as there are too many with countless more copy pasters arising every new day.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 26^th,  2011.