I study for my finals from various sources, the Internet, class notes and some reference books. This time though, I had this Computer Graphics, by Sanjesh Pawale, Techmax Publications. The books from this publishing house are everything what a Mumbai University guy needs to study for exam. Well, not exactly, but that’s how most see this book as.

So when I was reading it, I noticed that much of what I read in the book was something I already read someplace else. A quick browser history lookup revealed that the stuff were taken from Wikipedia. Wait, let me rephrase it, the stuff were copied and pasted from Wikipedia, including the text, images and caption.

For your information, the content of Wikipedia is licensed under creative commons attribution share-alike 3.0. The license states that the usage is unrestricted. even for commercial use as long as appropriate credits are given and indications of modifications are made. Moreover, the content, modified or original, must be distributed under the same license.

But there’s a bummer. The content copied by Techmax shows no attribution, no credits to Wikipedia or it’s authors, and the worst, they have copyrighted the book under their name and it’s totally restricted.

Here is a piece of text from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

To re-distribute text on Wikipedia in any form, provide credit to the authors either by including a) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the page or pages you are re-using, b) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or c) a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.)

So it is mandatory for TechMax to provide a backlink to the webpage they are lifting the content from. At least a bibliography at the end of the book. The second part to this is copyleft/share-alike policy. To quote,

If you make modifications or additions to the page you re-use, you must license them under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 or later.

Hence, Techmax is also violating this by copyrighting the content under their own restricting license. They should consider revising their license.

And finally, as far as the students are concerned, why not just take a little more effort and learn from the web instead of a printed version of the web.

Edit. A little proof of what I am talking about. The content in the image in copyrighted by *cough* Techmax *cough* and Wikipedia.

From Techmax, page8-23

From Wikipedia

As I said, this is just an instance. If anybody is interested, just send me a mail. I would be more than happy to provide you with more proof. Cheers!