(probably) I did that
Here's a risky think I had done in college which now is ok to reveal...
The thing that's triggering me to write this is just 2 minutes ago, I saw an abstract for a paper in some conference which suspiciously is very similar to my BE project report abstract.
Back in COEP, many a times I had to make a moral decision: which book to use for study? There were two options: (1) the book that was prescribed in the syllabus by the Univerity of Pune, or (2) "text books" published by local authors. These local authors are lecturers in the many engineering colleges in Pune. And these text books consisted of just the relevant sections from the reference books (the ones in option 1) necessary to pass the exams. So basically, studying from the local books will probably get you through the exams, but most likely you won't understand anything about the subject. On the other hand, studying from the reference books is harder because you have to spend time understanding things that may not be a part of the syllabus and you have to make a choice about what is relevant and what is not. Naturally, many people preferred the local books. But these local authors were making money by just copying stuff from other books. That's bullshit..it just pissed me off. So one day (in my third year I believe), when I was in one of my adventureous moods, I decided to do something about this. I sent an email to the general editor of Prentice Hall of India saying that these local authors are infringing the copyrights of the original authors by duplicating matter without any legal permission. Also, I sent an email to Roger Pressman, the author of "Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach", a popular software engineering book, asking him to do something and requesting him to keep my name out. Unbelievably, after 4-5 days, I actually received his reply, saying that he had contacted his editor at McGraw Hill about this. After a few months, I also heard that one of the professors at PICT was in trouble over something like this. Now I don't know if it was my email that did this or something else, but in any case, I felt good about what I did, and even today, I do.
The thing that's triggering me to write this is just 2 minutes ago, I saw an abstract for a paper in some conference which suspiciously is very similar to my BE project report abstract.
Back in COEP, many a times I had to make a moral decision: which book to use for study? There were two options: (1) the book that was prescribed in the syllabus by the Univerity of Pune, or (2) "text books" published by local authors. These local authors are lecturers in the many engineering colleges in Pune. And these text books consisted of just the relevant sections from the reference books (the ones in option 1) necessary to pass the exams. So basically, studying from the local books will probably get you through the exams, but most likely you won't understand anything about the subject. On the other hand, studying from the reference books is harder because you have to spend time understanding things that may not be a part of the syllabus and you have to make a choice about what is relevant and what is not. Naturally, many people preferred the local books. But these local authors were making money by just copying stuff from other books. That's bullshit..it just pissed me off. So one day (in my third year I believe), when I was in one of my adventureous moods, I decided to do something about this. I sent an email to the general editor of Prentice Hall of India saying that these local authors are infringing the copyrights of the original authors by duplicating matter without any legal permission. Also, I sent an email to Roger Pressman, the author of "Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach", a popular software engineering book, asking him to do something and requesting him to keep my name out. Unbelievably, after 4-5 days, I actually received his reply, saying that he had contacted his editor at McGraw Hill about this. After a few months, I also heard that one of the professors at PICT was in trouble over something like this. Now I don't know if it was my email that did this or something else, but in any case, I felt good about what I did, and even today, I do.
posted by Rahul at 4:20 PM
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