On Wednesday, Nagariknews.com ran a news story along with a ‘sting operation video’ on the copyright infringement by a well-known cyber business company.
Police arrested the owners of Dreams & Ideas – Dipankar and Abhinav Kasajoo who made name, fame and money through cyber business. They also redefined Nepali modeling industry with their very popular cybersansar.com and made money by developing websites for government agencies and others.
Their greed for money probably was much more and that put them into the illegal business of downloading pirated High Definition (HD) movies through torrents and selling them to customers through a website – givemehd.com (now closed) which lists hundreds of available movie titles.
Nagariknews sting video shows a man posing as a customer visiting the office of Dreams & Ideas and buying a 3D movie with Abhinav himself talking about it and handing a copied movie on external hard drive.
I wonder how they can do this so openly. Didn’t they know that was illegal or they were just trying to ignore? The news surprised many and a lot of people, including those in similar business, have asked me the same question: why they need to do so to earn a little more money?
It becomes even ridiculous with the price of the movie – Rs. 100 (US$ 1.5) for HD movie and Rs. 200 (US$ 3) for a 3D movie. With so many successful sites running, I know they earned a lot of money only through advertisements, and there was absolutely no need for them to go into something illegal.
In Nepal, we could buy a pirated DVD of any English or Hindi movie for Rs. 25 (less than half-a-dollar) anywhere as freely as we could buy a newspaper. Copyright law is not strongly implemented, but that’s not an excuse to anyone to do an illegal business.
Sadly, the Kasajoos are sons of Vinaya Kumar Kasajoo, a noted journalist and writer who is the chief commissioner at the National Information Commission and has been an advocate/expert for online journalism and related issues.
It’s still to see if they are proven guilty or not, but it should go down as a story of greed!
0 responses to “Cybersansar scandal: Greed for money”
Was it necessary to name the father of Kasajoo brothers in this story? What does code of ethics say? I don’t know. Just curious. Hope u will explain.
Bismabh jee, naming him or not doesn’t make any change in the fact that they are his sons – and unless it’s proven by the court, they are innocent. I could have omitted father’s name but I believe that them being his sons prove that they knew what they were doing.
Do you think they knew the severity of their actions? Copyright, wordmark, trademark infringements is common place in Nepal. Even Nepal’s biggest companies and most popular media outlets are commonly guilty of it. It seems there is just a lack of understanding of the issue.
I can cite so many examples, from banks having logos identical to that of foreign banks, to the use of watermark photos in newspapers, to TV shows using soundtracks of popular American programs. The other day I even received a brochure from a sports related Nepali NGO that was word for word ripped from the FIFA’s CSR handbook.
This is ridiculous.
Greed is probably the right word i can think of too. considering their pioneer celebrity status & popularity, to go for such copyright infringement is terrible. considering they are in media themselves with so much copyright notices on their websites, is again unacceptable to say the least.
having said that, I have certain sympathy towards the culprits regarding our laws & its misuse. Probably 99% of us are still typing all this in pirated version of Windows. So isn’t it time we ask ourselves about ethics as well?
UPDATE: The Kasajoo brothers were set free as the police failed to file the case for “lack of sufficient evidences” and legal provisions.
Police released them on Oct 5 on the advice of government attorney that their case couldn’t be registered since the existing Copyright Act and E-commerce Act lack proper provisions on HD films circulation and no case was filed against them by any HD film company claiming compensations for the loss.
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