Tamil dictionary dispute I.
Dominik Wujastyk
D.Wujastyk at ucl.ac.uk
Thu Jul 7 23:25:18 UTC 1994
Indian Express, Madras, Wednesday June 8, 1994. Front page:
============================================================
GERMAN UNIVERSITY `LIFTS' FROM TAMIL DICTIONARY
A Madras scholar moves High Court for Remedy
by Rasheeda Bhagat
Madras
Even as there is a lot of debate on intellectual property
rights and even as many research scholars from Indian
universities take flak for plagiarising Ph.D. theses from
foreign universities, an interesting case of a Madras writer
and publisher accusing the Indology department of a German
university of "lifting en masse" a modern Tamil dictionary
brought out by his company, has come to light.
The infuriated scholar - S. Ramakrishnan, managing partner of
Cre-A Publishing House - has moved the Madras High Court for
remedy. Justice Goverdhan has issued an interim injunction
directing the defendant - the Institute of Indology and Tamil
Studies (IITS). University of Cologne, Germany - restraining
it "from interfering with the plaintiff's copyright of the
work `Kriyavin Tarkalat Tamil Agarathi' (Tamil-Tamil-English)
dictionary". The German university has been restrained from
making available copies of its work, which Ramakrishnan
accuses of infringing on his copyright, to any computer
network or database, or the publication or distribution of the
printed copies of its work.
Advocate Sriram Panchu who represented Ramakrishnan in this
landmark case in the High Court submitted that as the German
publication, which had violated his client's copyright, was
already available on the computer network at the IIT and the
SPIC Science Foundation at Madras, the Madras High Court had
jurisdiction to take up the case.
Cre-A is an innovative publishing house in Tamil started in
1974, which has attempted to explore the hitherto unexplored
areas in the language. In 1987, ramakrishnan goat a Rs. 7.2
lakh grant from HRD Ministry to compile and publish a
dictionary of modern Tamil (Tamil-Tamil-English). Summarising
the objective of the publication, Ramakrishnan said, "There is
need to periodically document the words and the changes in
meaning and content. Language, a product of cultural and
technological forces, keeps changing. New words come into
use, words disappear, existing words lose some of their sense
or take additional sense and forms of words and grammatical
behaviour also change."
To achieve this objective, in the initial stage, a team of
Tamil scholars, working ont he Dictionary of Contemporary
Tamil (DCT), had to plough through 140,000 pages of various
Tamil texts such as newspaper reports, government
publications, magazines, fiction, school texts, etc.
In the next stage, a team of English scholars were involved in
the exercise. As a result of six years of work the dictionary
was published in January 1992, with the copyright resting on
the managing editor of the dictionary, S. Ramakrishnan. But
he was shocked to find that within six months - by June 1992 -
the Indology Department of the Cologne University came out
with the Tamil-German dictionary. He says that of the 18,000
entries, nearly 16,000 have been lifted from DCT, with the
English meaning provided by the Madras work, being translated
into German. Even the order of the entries has remained
unchanged.
Worse the Online Tamil-English Lexicon (OTL) of the German
University has been made available through the E-Mail to a
computer network to which people all over the world have
access. "These days, as it is rare to find a foreign Tamil
scholar who does not use computers, I had no other remedy than
to approach the court because I am certain that the sales of
our work will be affected. By making available words in
contemporary Tamil, identified by us, and their English
meanings through a facility available right at the table of
the scholars, they have been prevented from buying our work,"
he said adding that only a couple of months ago he had sold a
machine readable copy (on diskettes) to a Japanese scholar at
US $2000.
On October 19, 1993, Ramakrishnan received a letter from
Dieter B. Kapp. Director of the IITS, in which he
categorically acknowledged that their "Tamil-German dictionary
owes much to your pathbreaking 1992 publication of a Tamil-
Tamil-English dictionary". Later, however, another letter
from the Institute, dated March 5, 1994, said that the
dictionary was not to be published in the near future.
Said Ramakrishnan, "I received this letter when the dictionary
was already in circulation. This is totally unethical.
Institutions which should set high standards in academic
integrity and pave the way for intellectual cooperation among
various cultures, are doing things, which undermine this very
purpose.
Advocate Sriram Panchu says that the High Court interim stay
is the first step in the case. "In the midst of all this GATT
discussion, when we are at the receiving end of charges and
allegations of breach of intellectual property rights, I was
delighted to take up a case like this. These people had spent
years of work on the dictionary, and it was atrocious on the
part of the German institute to straightaway poach on the
work.
Ramakrishan adds that the most serious implication of the
whole issue is that the institute might not stop at this.
According to an E Mail communication exchange dated April 17,
the IITS representative, in answer to a question from a user,
says "We are working on machine readable versions of the works
of several modern Tamil authors starting with Rajam Iyer's
`Kamalambal Charitiram' and including works of Kalki,
Kothainayakiammal, Akilan, Jeyakanthan, Janakiraman Mauni,
etc. "I wonder whether they have got permission to do so from
the copyright holders for these works," he added bitterly.
==
Dominik Wujastyk Phone (and voice messages): +44 71 611 8467
Wellcome Institute, FAX: +44 71 611 8545
183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE.
More information about the INDOLOGY
mailing list