Business Standard swung into action over our complaints and discontinued their arrangements with Jaspreet Bindra. A message from T.N. Ninan the Editor of Business Standard confirm this. Thank you Mr. Ninan.
The crusade paid off, the battle has been won. But the war is still due! This doesn’t mean that copying is not going on any where else. For example I was informed about this quiz posted on another e-group on Google. This picks a few questions from other email groups, without even changing words. It even contains a few questions from Yours Truly.
This hurts. One of those questions took an hour to frame, going back to my little black book, and linking two questions, and then confirming the information over the net. (The Lamborghini-Ferrari Question), Even the alphabets have been used exactly as I had written.
Quinkie had a discussion over the “copyright” over quiz questions. some people responded by saying that the information anyways is assimilated from various sources , so how can we decide if we have a copyright over the questions? Lets see :
First off, and very important, I am not even a newbie about IPR, or any similar thing. My discussion is more on the basis of my ethics, and little broken knowledge from here and there.
Its true most of the information used in the quiz questions is already available here and there. The Quizmaster comes into picture when he puts that information, in form of a question, and and tries to put in his intelligence, so that a questions contain a clue, or is so contorted that its impossible to find the answer, or various other twists that good quiz questions are known for. This is also a race for the first past the post.
For example a question like “What is the difference between Ozone and Oxygen?” This straightforward question probably has been asked a million times since the discovery of Ozone.
You ask this in a quiz a hundred times, no one sues you for IPR violation.
But if someone asks : “In one form A this is result of photosynthesis in plants and consumed by other living beings. In other form B it saves us from harmful UV rays of the Sun and is also used in bleaching. What am I talking about?” That makes the questions different, and ‘probably’ unique. You twist this around, add your own fact to it and ask the question, no one sues you for IPR violation not atleast the quizzerati. But if you ask the same question verbatim, without even changing the letters A and B there, You are a copyright thief and add-your-own-chosen-colorful-words-here, at least to the quizzerati.
This is the distinction that we should maintain atleast. And In case someone still feels like duplicating the question, at least mention the source. Its not very difficult to do “contributed by Mr so and so in the group so and so.” Thats all that we are asking.