Mumbai Mirror's bloggers park

There is a newspaper called Mumbai Mirror that runs free with our Times of India subscription. Mostly it carries B and C grade content, except for some changing topics in their bloggers park. Usually they link up three to four blogs with a small extract from each. Well, thats what I thought until today. They linked up my blog in today's edition. The online version reads here.

It seems that the illiterate journalists out there think that all content on web is free, especially blogs; for them its public content. My blog, however, is licensed under Creative Commons. I particularly don't believe in copyrights, being an opensource believer, but I hate it when someone *edits* my content and quotes me so. I may not even mind if someone takes my content as is and doesn't attribute it to me, as much as when they do that editing with my name! This is what Mumbai Mirror did. They changed my content, but worse still, added lines to it! The last line on their extract isn't mine at all! My original content was meant to be a satire and their addition to it screws up the content entirely.

So I have a message for these journos: If you lack the decency of keeping originality or are too dumb to even do copy pasting, then don't be a journalist please! No one put a gun to your head to print my content. You did it yourself, without my approval in the first place... nakal ko bhi akal lagta hai. :)