Update on the Yahoo India and Malayalam Blogs Saga

Here is more on it.

Finally Yahoo! India (someone at customer care, not an official) responded to our many emails stating:

The Malayalam story was provided to us by Webdunia.com (the content provider) on the express representation that they are duly authorized by the author of the story to publish it. In the circumstances therefore, we do not admit of any copyright violation, as alleged by you.

Although there is no copyright violation and without prejudice to our rights, the said story has been removed from our web site, to avoid any further controversy.Should you have any further concerns on copyright violations, please write in to copyright@webdunia.com and it will be addressed by the webdunia team.

Yahoo even denies that there was any copyright violation, even when they instantly removed it from their servers when caught. If there was no copyright violation, why would anyone care to remove it? Or are they claiming blogs do not have copyright laws?

Malayalam Bloggers Don't Agree with Yahoo India

I became aware that yahoo India has apparently lifted stuff from Malayalam bloggers to lauch its portal in the same language via Om Malik.

There is a blog post detailing the incident and Yahoo’s dealing with the issue.

While we were researching Yahoo’s content providers, we came across a provider, Webdunia (mentioned before). From our investigation, we found that they are the ones who collect information/features/articles to be posted on Yahoo India.

With the knowledge that we had made a formal complaint to Yahoo/Yahoo India, Webdunia came forward with vague options for remuneration as well as an apology from Webdunia and not from Yahoo India.

Cross posted at Blogbharti.