(Photo credit: Carly Franklin)
Just a day ago, a Bhubaneshwar b-school claimed it is two hours away from the beaches of New England, America. You would think it got confused with the beaches of Puri, but when you read the page marked ‘Student Life’ on the website of Regional College of Management (RCM), you might feel that the world changed its coordinates while you were sleeping. The college is situated in a prominent location at Bhubaneshwar city, yet the website (see screenshot below) claimed that the beaches and mountains of New England in Massachusetts are two hours away by bus or car. It’s almost like you’ve reached the wall at the platform of 9 and 3/4 in Harry Potter and you could teleport to another part of the world in a short span of time.
Under the category of student life, in the third paragraph, the website said,
The rich educational, cultural and entertainment resources of the Boston area are within easy reach of the MIT campus by public transportation and are popular with students during periods of leisure. The beaches and mountains of New England are less than two hours away by bus or car.
But just as you were about to believe that there was a secret route that would transport you from Bhubaneshwar to New England, you notice the words MIT in the same sentence. So you immediately check for similar content of the web and voila, Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Centre for Real Estate’s website has the original content!
The screenshots of RCM and MIT’s Centre for Real Estate’s student life pages
Despite many attempts to get a comment from MIT, PaGaLGuY did not get a response. But when Dr Prabir Pal, director of RCM, was told about the copied content, he seemed unaware of its existence on the website. “I was not aware of this,” he said. “We had given the task of designing the website to another company and we were at the time in a hurry to revamp the website as we were being inspected by the Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programmes (ACBSP), USA.” It seems that Swash Convergence Technologies, the company that was outsourced the job of designing the website for the college, did not have time enough to write new content for their client and the Regional College of Management was in its turn not careful enough to check the content of the website before making it live.
This negligence is considered illegal under copyright infringement laws. Danish Sheikh, researcher on media law at the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, says that there are two parts involved in a case like this. “If a website has reproduced a substantial portion then it is under copyright infringement of literary work, and the plaintiff can resort to civil remedy,” he said. “They can ask for an injunction to remove the content and sue for damage to its reputation.” Now for this particular case, although the portion reproduced is one paragraph, MIT can go to court to order an injunction. But because of the third party involved, RCM can also sue Swash Convergence Technologies for damaging its reputation. What can easily happen to online portals is that the people involved remain blissfully unaware of the careless plagiarism and the original defaulters carry on with their business as usual. It was only after PaGaLGuY pointed it out that RCM has taken action and corrected the error on its website.