Viswanathan K's Thoughts

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” For the upcoming Jurassic Park movie, they invented a new dinosaur! Most of us would probably feel the way Nilay Patel felt about that : “The whole point of Jurassic Park is to bring real dinosaurs into the present day...Take away the real dinosaurs, and you're just left with a made-up monster movie.” So why then did they invent a new dino? Tim Carmody responded to Patel on Twitter on the possible reason: “We need clear IP on the dinosaur, the toy companies say they can’t have any copycats this time.” Wait a minute…You can get IP (intellectual property/patents/copyright etc) on a species that roamed the earth? Is that insane or what? Of course, IP is not always a bad thing. If it weren’t there, what would be the incentive for anyone to come up with new ideas, like lifesaving pharmaceuticals? Then again, IP does cover areas between pharma and, I don’t know, dinosaurs. Like industrial design. Apple’s head of desig...

Charles Hartman wrote an interesting article on being plagiarized . Some guy from Qatar e-mailed Hartman (who lives in England) telling him that someone in England had plagiarized one of his poems. Soon enough, a bunch of (mostly) Brit poets working through Facebook groups exposed more and more such cases. Don’t you just love the Internet?! Hartman wondered why perpetrators (like David R. Morgan in his case) did it in an era where being found out and shamed in front of thousands is not at all difficult? Wouldn’t info about such acts now sitting for all eternity in Google’s servers, to be queried and found even decades later be a deterrent? Why do plagiarists still take such risks, Hartman wondered? Hartman also felt insulted: “The insult was partly that the plagiarist assumed my poem was too obscure for anyone to discover his theft.” That is partly the answer to the risk question, isn’t it? Guys like Morgan must have considered the odds of getting caught and decided guys ...