Dealing with Copyright Violation

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I got up one morning, opened the newspaper and saw a picture from my travel blog staring at me. After confirming that it is indeed my picture, I wrote to the Editor of the newspaper, and this was the beginning of my yearlong struggle to get compensated for the IP infringement. I chose to explore the official or formal routes to get the resolution, though most blogger friends suggested that making a noise online is the best way to get compensated. At the end of the saga, I knew their wisdom made sense, nonetheless, there was lot of learning about IP, various forums that should help you resolve issues in case violators do not respond responsibly and practically what happens when you are an individual fighting an established organization. So here I am sharing what I learnt in the process. This is no way comprehensive, it comes from my own experience and that of fellow bloggers who shared their stories, but this might help you in case you are totally lost on where to go and what to do.

What is IP?

Intellectual Property is an asset that you create from your intellect that can be in the form of written word, painting, photograph, video, music or any expression of your creativity. By default you are the owner of the your creative output and no explicit registration of formality is required to claim it to be yours, but you should be able to prove that it is yours. For the text, if you publish it first, that is a good enough proof, for photographs if you have the originals in your possession that is good enough. Since the term includes the word ‘property’, you can do with your IP all that you can do with your other properties like a car or a house. You can sell it, donate it, rent it, let someone use it for limited period of time, keep it to you or make any alterations to it. For anyone else to use it or do anything with it, they must take your explicit permission.

There are many types of IPs: Patents, Copyrights, Trademarks, Service marks and Geographical Indicators. For creative professionals the most relevant one is copyright, so I shall limit this to copyright.

Practically, when you publish a blog post – text or pictures, it is your copyright. Anyone using your work without your permission is infringing upon your IP.

Read Indian Copyright Act 1957.

When your IP is infringed?

First thing you need to do is informing the editor or any other responsible person about it and tell them what do you want in terms of apology, acknowledgement or compensation. Establish the fact that IP belongs to you and it has been used without your permission. If the person receiving your communication is sensible enough, he would apologize and seek an amicable resolution. It does happen at times and you can consider yourself lucky if it happens.

If not, you can try and escalate your complaint to the highest authority in the organization, and hope that they will resolve. If it happens, you are still lucky.

If not, you may need a third part intervention to sort it out and here are some of the forums you can go to for resolution:

Press Council of India: If any media house or publication has infringed your IP, this is ideally the forum you should go to. The website lists the complete process to file a complaint that can be filed via e-mail also. The representatives of PCI are present in every big city, though the complaint has to be filed in their Delhi office. There charter mentions that they have the authority to help resolve such cases, including helping you get the relevant compensation from the offender.

Unfortunately, I did not come across any case of independent professionals that was resolved by PCI.

Economic Offense Wing of the Police: This is a wing within the police department that deals with economic offences, and you can potentially file complaint with them, if after repeated communications, you have not received any response from the other party.

I did not go to EOW, so do not have first hand details on this. I did get to hear from a fellow blogger that this wing helped her settle the issue with a leading publication.

News laundry: They claim to turn mirrors on to themselves and keep a watch on media. They are not a conflict resolution agency, but their profile seems to communicate that you can go to them if you have a grievance. This what they say you can contact them for: If you would like to send us an article or report a case of mis–reporting by a newspaper, magazine
 or channel, email it to contact@newslaundry.com You can try your luck with them.

The Hoot: This is a media watch organizations with a complete section on Media Ethics. I hear that they have helped quite a few bloggers and freelance writers in getting a resolution from the media houses. You can file a complaint through them and they try to reach out to the media house and bring the two together for an amicable resolution. I recommend you give them a try.

I filed a complaint with them and they were very quick in responding, but unfortunately they also could not help me.

Legal Route: The final resort is to file a case in court of law. You can begin by sending a legal notice through a lawyer that will go to the senior management of the publication. Hopefully this should make the management act, but remember by this time egos would have come in place and lawyers do cost quite a bit. Follow the legal course, but be prepared to fight it out for years if needed.

I would not have taken the legal route, as most lawyer friends suggested that it would take at least 7-8 years to fight it out and in my mental calculations this was not worth the effort and resources required.

Use the power of Social Media: You can write about the incidence and garner support from your readers / fans / followers by tagging the official channels of the publications, if there is one. Most publications are concerned about negative publicity and would want to curtail it. This has worked well for bloggers who are well established and have a strong following.

I did not use this, but I know people who have used this method very effectively

Practically speaking

Evaluate the cost of fighting and be aware of the non-tangible costs involved – frustration, disappointment, long wait times, feeling directionless and helpless.

All the channels mentioned above are run by people and whether they work for you or not depends on the person handling your case. For different people different things have worked, so explore and take a call on what works for you.

Know your rights very clearly, that helps you put across your case to any of these agencies strongly.

Report the case to all the agencies in writing for the purpose of records. This also puts a pressure on them to respond as non-response can work against them eventually.

Use professional and legal language (to the extent you can) in your communication. Try to avoid emotional outbursts. Keep them for your close circle of family and friends.

Seek guidance from people who can help you, who have gone through this before you. Avoid spending energy in online forums by cribbing about it; it can take you to negative spiral. In case you are taking a social media route, seek out support from all the forums that you are a part of.

Managing Homeless Ideas

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Alessandro Di Fiore in his HBR Article Getting Crazy Ideas off the Ground primarily sites two examples of corporate funds at P&G and Samsung Electronics that fund the ideas that have no clear owners and that are not coming out of any systemic pipeline but appear randomly as and when they happen to someone in the system. Since both the examples mentioned are working and working successfully, there must be something very right they must be doing. It would have been interesting is the author had sites examples of the successful innovations that came out of these innovations, and the kind of non-financial resources that were committed to this.  Was there anything done to ensure that there are ideas that come into this bucket, because in general people just do not get up and get ideas.

Having said that organizations do need to have a trap to capture the ideas that may be too radical or crazy as the article says, or ideas that do not fall in any category or have no probability to come through systemic pipeline.

 

Friends & Foes of Innovation

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Paul Sloane has a way of communicating. He tells you what many others may tell you in a way that you would listen, understand and hopefully implement. In his simple article Innovation’s Three Good Friends and Three Deadly Enemies, he simply gives you three things that you need to imbibe in your organization to nurture and nourish innovation and three things that you need to keep in check to let innovation flourish.

Picking up from Paul, here is my list.

3 Best Friends of Innovation

  1. Leadership commitment: Unless leadership shows its commitment to innovation, it is least likely to happen. Most organizations are busy implementing the vision of the one sitting on top and if innovation or for that matter any other program is not in the list up there, the chances of it happening are very bleak. Once it is there it is important for the leader to keep sharing his thoughts his goals to the teams so that they are aware of his continued commitment
  2. Enabling People to Think Creatively: Most large organizations are built over standardization programs where people are told about SOPs and are often punished for deviations. When you ask them to think creatively, you are asking them to go against the grain, so are you enabling them, training them to think creatively or not
  3. Constructively Engaging people: Most companies ask for ideas and then do not do anything about, it becomes another item on their to-do list. Ask ideas only if you can respond to them, act on them and create something for the business out of it. No one likes to give ideas and not have any response to it

3 Worst Foes of Innovation

  1. What is Innovation: Not having a common understanding of what innovation means to your business? Everyone has their own version and it becomes like elephant and the 7 blind men trying to solve the puzzle.
  2. Flexibility: Not having flexibility built into the system to allow people to work on new ideas and to allow potential failures.
  3. Middle Management Trap: Top management commits to innovation, younger people get excited and come up with new ideas but both end up being trapped in middle management trap – a layer that is too focussed on delivering the operational results. Each organization needs to attend to this – as operations are no less important and must not suffer while the innovation needs to be included in the agenda of middle management.

Would love to hear your views on this.

Agility & Innovation

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In the Strategy & Business article The Agility Factor, authors make a case that agile organizations are more profitable. They explore this concept to present how the agility helps the organizations to respond faster to the changing environments – internal or external through the flexibility in the system. Agility can also be interpreted as ability to innovate as and when the opportunity presents itself, it means the flexibility in the systems, processes and more importantly the culture of the organization to be able to re-invent or re-adjust itself to tap on new opportunities or respond to new threats in the market.

Authors give 4 primary components of being agile:

  1. Dynamic Strategy i.e. a strategy that is not rigid and can be changed on the go as required. There is also a component of strategy being transparent to all employees, that helps it in being flexible, as people know what it is and why it needs to be changed.
  2. Perceiving Environmental Change requires the built in sensors that can sense the changes in the environment as early as possible. This requires that some part of organization has strong ears that is always listening to the waves outside. There should be mechanism to analyze these changes to see how and where they impact the organization, and what is the best possible response to it.
  3. Testing Responses – This is where the innovation engine comes in picture. As soon as an opportunity is identified, you need to find or create solutions, test them, fine tune them and after the required iterations launch them in the market for the customers to use them.
  4. Implementing Change – My interpretation of this would be mainstreaming the new solutions, inducting it in your product portfolio and making it a standard offering.

I quite like their breaking down of this agility factor, this can help organizations identify what parts exist in their system and what need to be inducted or improved. Examples given are also very robust and appropriate.

 

Speed of Innovation

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Paul Sloane in his latest article Is the Innovation engine running out of steam? compares the key innovations that happened over last couple of centuries that changed the way we lived or gave us new dimensions like ability to travel with speed, to walk on the moon and how in last 30-40 years no substantial innovation has really happened. He has obviously discounted the Internet revolution as something that has not added value.

While in the first part he makes sense as the speed of travel kind of halted after a while, but is it not possible that we reached a level beyond which you can not increase the speed without compromising the safety or at the viable costs. Every innovation has a peak value and once it reaches around that, leap frogging from there may not be possible, while incremental innovations will keep happening.

Internet is still its nascent stage. In the developed world it has become an integral part of the personal and professional lives, developing world is still catching up. The applications are still in the process of taking a mature shape. It may be too early to say if this can be compared to the invention of steam engine or telephone or not. I would say if we wait while the rest of the world also goes online, there may be much bigger impacts waiting to happen, and as Thomas Friedman said it would definitely flatten the world by creating the level playing field for everyone. Now, should this worry the developed world as they might loose their innovation edge or the differential that kept them above the rest of the world, the differential that made them aspirational for the people of not so developed world, may be yes.

Article does make you think are we sitting back and simply enjoying the innovations of our grand fathers and great grand fathers? Should we be doing something to make lives different for our grandchildren?

Innovation: Bucket from Used Tyres

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Rural Innovations

Bucket made from used tyres…Image Courtesy: Hemant Abhyankar

 

I was in Jhabua, MP to attend a tribal festival and at that fair I saw various small innovations, or rather ways of using stuff that lives the principle of re-cycle, re-use and reduce.

This bucket was one of the things made from used tyres, that are usually discarded and are hardly considered useful for anything else. There were slippers and other footwear also made from the same rubber, and people were using them as regular items.

Is this not what we need to imbibe in our lifestyles?

This is a picture of

NASSCOM 10,000 Startups invites applications for funding and acceleration

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NASSCOM 10,000 Startups invites applications for funding and acceleration

 

  • Partners with Hyderabad Angels, TiE Incubator, and IIIT-Hyderabad Incubator to nurture the entrepreneurial ecosystem in AP
  • Shortlisted entrepreneurs will be entitled to a funding of Rs 25 lakh to Rs 2 crore from leading angel investor networks of India

Hyderabad, April 10, 2013: As a next step to its recently launched ’10,000 startups’ program, the National Association of Software & Services Companies (NASSCOM), today signed a MoU with Hyderabad Angels, TiE Incubator and IIIT Hyderabad Incubator to collaborate and support the creation of a vibrant ecosystem to foster technology entrepreneurship in India. NASSCOM further announced the inviting of applications from innovative technology startups across the country for an insightful engagement with its accelerator and funding partners. This invitation procedure will be taken forth via the recently launched startup portal www.10000startups.com. The association has already received over 1000 applications from various budding startups since the launch of the program and is expected to cross over 5000 startup applications in the next eight weeks.

 

As part of the initiative, NASSCOM will shortlist close to 500 entrepreneurs who will be eligible for funding of Rs 25 lakh to Rs 2 crore through the leading angel investor networks of the country. Selected startups will be offered 3 to 4 months of incubation at leading incubators of India, along with co-working space at affordable cost. Under the MoU, NASSCOM, along with partners, will also focus on multifold activities aimed at fostering entrepreneurship, building entrepreneurial capabilities at scale and providing robust early stage support through mentorship.

 

The selected startups will be provided with a startup kit worth Rs 10 lakhs comprising of a host of free business tools from Microsoft, AWS and Google. Focused initiatives through webinars will provide a focus on emerging technology trends and whitespaces where upcoming startups can build ventures.

 

On the occasion of the MOU signing, Mr. Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM, said, “NASSCOM has always believed in the potential of the Indian startup ecosystem and has been supporting it through initiatives like EMERGE. The response that we have received since the launch of our 10,000 startup program is overwhelming and we are now ensuring that the reach of this program is maximized. We have partnered with some of the best incubators and accelerators in Hyderabad who understand dynamics of the ecosystem and will help us foster the entrepreneurship and innovation in this region”.

 

With the launch of the startup programme, Andhra Pradesh has been identified as an important startup hub with almost 13 percent of the new startups residing in the region and focused on technologies around product, mobility and cloud. The NASSCOM 10,000 program will aim at scaling up the existing startup hub to the next level of growth.

 

Start-ups today are amongst the most critical pillar of the Indian IT industry representing a huge opportunity for India to retain its competitive advantage. Over the past few years, start-ups have contributed to the industry by building niche products and services and tapping non-core markets. To sustain the overall economic growth it is imperative to have more entrepreneurs in the country that will transform the landscape and propagate development. The NASSCOM 10,000 program will enable thousands of entrepreneur’s setup and grow their businesses and in the process propel India’s economy.

 

About NASSCOM

NASSCOM® is the premier trade body and the chamber of commerce of the IT-BPO industries in India. NASSCOM is a global trade body with more than 1300 members, which include both Indian and multinational companies that have a presence in India. NASSCOM’s member and associate member companies are broadly in the business of software development, software services, software products, consulting services, BPO services, e-commerce & web services, engineering services off-shoring and animation and gaming. NASSCOM’s membership base constitutes over 95% of the industry revenues in India and employs over 2.32 million professionals.

Connecting the Dots

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Jeff Degraff in his MIX article  Why the Most Innovative Companies Aren’t talks about what inhibits innovation in organizations is the fact that larger the organization, more it is divided in compartments, independent silos with very limited visibility of what is happening elsewhere in the company. In fact, in most organizations people hardly understand the function of other functions, forget about understanding their challenges or the potential collaboration points. This is where a lot of scope to innovate is lost. When people prefer to work in their smaller teams or circles, they miss the larger picture, the miss the other angles to the problem they are trying to solve and hence bring down their chances to come out with real big innovations. As a company, it is a big challenge to bring together a cross functional team that can bring the multiple perspectives to table.

I also love what he says about Innovative companies: What makes innovation companies unique is, well, unique. That is they are highly adapted for their specific situation. I have been trying to tell this for a long time that Innovation is a very personal and unique journey for an organization. While you can take ideas and inspirations from the experiences of others, you must define Innovation means to you at a given point in time and the stage of your business. What and where you need to innovate is a function of where you are standing on your path and where you are going, and the path chosen must be completely yours.

Stealth Innovation

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Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg in their HBR article The Case of Stealth Innovation talk about a potential path that innovators can take when they have an idea that they think is worth pursuing. They argue that though going to C-level executives with your idea is your best bet because if you are able to get support from them, you pretty much have everything available to you to go ahead. In the same breath they warn that if your idea is rejected by them, most probably because of paucity of time or lack of attention, there is very little chance of your idea being accepted again. authors are talking more in the realm of human psychology and sure it plays a major role in decision making though it is usually underplayed in the logical corporate world. They suggest a approach where you do the ground work for your idea in a stealth mode, with a limited team and resources from internal budgets, and once the idea is demonstrable, share it with the people who matter. You probably have a much bigger chances of watching your ideas adopted by the organization. I loved their MTV example.

I only want to add that this can be one of the many approaches to approach innovation. When you follow this approach do not forget to take the political dynamics in your organization, in your senior management circles. If you are using resources without the consent of the people responsible, be prepared for a backfire.  Idea will be successful is no guarantee, do evaluate a scenario where you idea potentially fails, are you willing to face the music if it fails or if your actions are questioned.

I always think that each situation is so unique that you can never have any rights and wrongs. Wherever there are examples for success of one kind of approach, there may be as many of it failure. Take a balanced approach, following your own intuition.

Truths about Innovation.

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There is no doubt that Innovation today is probably the most mis-used and may be abused world in the business world. We all want to be innovative, but we have no common definition of Innovation, so when we explain our innovation, the first thing that we need to do is explain what do I mean by innovation. Jim Stikeleather in his MIX blog Six Fundamental Truth about Innovation talks about his observations or the truths that he discovered while judging is Innovation Challenge. I must say his inferences are priceless.

I loved what he said about measures: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure – How true. We see a lot of entrepreneurs trying to be a part of the lists of coolest / hottest companies, we see people working towards getting certifications like ISO and other quality standards – all of which become a goal rather than a means to a goal.

In general he says and I add:

  1. Innovation is concrete and not fuzzy
  2. It involves risk – Most organizations have developed their DNA to avoid risk and now when they have to do something against the DNA, it is a challenge
  3. Innovation is a team effort – despite examples always coming from individuals
  4. Innovation is hard to measure and it may be a challenge to live with it given that everything should be measurable in a predictable organization
  5. Innovation is not incremental – Now this actually depends on how you define it and what the organization needs at that point in time and stage of business
  6. Innovation is open – Ideally yes.