How SiliconIndia Plagiarised From My Blog

• Sharebar

Popular magazine SiliconIndia that claims to be biggest producer of technology news in India with a strong editorial team, has just lifted an entire post from our recent interview with HR Influencer, Gautam Ghosh!

SiliconIndia, launched as a print magazine on India’s 50^th Independence Day (15^th August, 1997) states its mission as, “Help build a smarter India by empowering Indian professionals to share their experiences and knowledge with communities of Indian professionals.”

As it turns out, this seemingly noble mission turns out to be so false!

Today morning, I found an interesting link on SiliconIndia, titled as “Gautam Ghosh:  Indian Blogger Who Interlinked Social Media, HR and Business” that was published on 7th of August (which they have deleted now, but you can see the cached copy we had saved). Recently, Gautam completed a decade of blogging and was kind enough to give us an interview sharing his experiences, which we had published on our blog on the 26^th of July. So I was intrigued to read the SiliconIndia article.

My basic curiosity soon led to a shocker when I saw major similarities in SiliconIndia article and the interview we had published, right after the first two paragraphs. Starting with the story flow to the manner in which it ends, copying responses and even paragraphs that give insights!

Excluding the first two paragraphs (which obviously have been lifted from other source), the article starts with the introduction of Gautam Ghosh and a little excerpt from an article on Forbes, where author Shel Israel had interviewed Gautam tagging him as a ‘Social Media Thought Leader from India’.

This is the same excerpt we have displayed on our blog. How can two different content producers choose to display the same excerpt from a massive article? Besides, SiliconIndia did not even provide the Forbes interview link.

Everything in between quotes has been copied i.e. All of Gautam’s responses to us.

While a few sentences have been edited smartly, while conveying the same idea, two paragraphs were not tampered with at all!

Also, the link on Drizzlin goes to the Drizzlin website, whereas the link we had provided in our post goes to an interview we had done earlier with Robin Abraham, Co-Founder at Drizzlin!

The recent episode of plagiarism where CNN host and Time magazine contributing editor, Fareed Zakaria was found guilty of borrowing content from a New Yorker essay, brings us again to the fore of this digital plague. While a suspended Zakaria has issued a public apology, I wonder what SiliconIndia’s stand would be.

We, hereby urge SiliconIndia to remove this article from their site and give us a public apology.

Slider image courtesy: Internet Khazana

Vinaya Naidu

Co-Founder and Blogger at Lighthouse Insights. A student of life, art and building relationships. Love to read just about anything and strongly believe that books make a beautiful world.

Twitter - More Posts

Tagged as: plagiarism, social media news