It was brought to our notice that some of our readers have taken material from our website and reproduced it on other avenues without any mention of the original source.
Example 1:
An article published in a Kashmiri Shaivite magazine Praznath – ‘A look at some basic concepts of Srividya‘ – by one Sree Mahalakshmi (who is described as a “profound Srividya scholar” in this article). This, in many parts, is a direct copy of an article from our Website – Srichakra.
Example 2:
Some E-books by Udaya Bhaaskar Bulusu where entire chapters are directly copied from our website and presented as the original work of the author. The same author is also on scribd where he generously copies entire articles again from our website and turns the whole thing into one big mess.
Example 3:
Some dubious guy named Selvam, who calls himself a ‘siddha’ – has copied material from our site and he blatantly uses it to advertise his services. Here is the link to his website.
Example 4:
Website of one ‘Karunamaya Baba‘ uses some of our writings – viz a viz even with obsolete links – here. There is a prominent PayPal ‘donate’ link on that website – so this site and its owner do seem to have some commercial interests. (Edit: The article seems to have now been removed after this post was made).
We have no issues with such plagiarization or bad internet etiquette – for nothing written on our website we claim to be original; after all, these are revelations of the sages and the scriptures, and these can be no one man’s property. However, if our labor of love gets exploited for commercial purposes (which unfortunately has been true in several cases), we do take strong objection to such practice. We are now aware of some books in Telugu (Ucchishta Ganapati Stava, Upasana Tattva, etc.) and Sanskrit/Hindi which are directly copied from articles on our website and sold as the original work of the “author”. We have sent notifications to those who we think are potentially plagiarizing writings from our website for commercial purposes. We do not want folks with questionable credentials using our material to sell snake oil to the gullible.
Our request to our readers is only this – please feel free to use material from our website, even without quoting the source – if that amounts to bad etiquette, so be it – but please do not use the material for commercial purposes. If such instances come to our notice, they shall be dealt with suitably.