| Copyright
or Copy-it-right
Nepalnet
 While
researching more than 300 websites
in a year, almost every one we visited
had a copyright notice somewhere on
the website. Technically, copyright
is defined in most countries as the
legal right of creator, publisher,
or distributor of a work for exclusive
right to distribution, or modification
of the work. There is some form of
copyright law in every country including
Nepal. However, the extent of the
law and degree of enforcement differs
from a country to country.
Copyright
has been an especially important
issue since the popularity of the
Internet. Before, if you wanted to
copy anything, the creation and the
distribution were difficult, expensive
and dangerous. With the popularity
of computers and the Internet all
you need to do is copy it and paste
it.
 Nepal
is always known as the land where
there is virtually no copyright enforcement.
Go to any video stores in Nepal, and
you will find the latest pirated Hollywood
and Bollywood movies. Go to the next
shop and you will find Windows XP
selling for mere three dollars. Thus,
when we looked into Nepali websites,
we thought we would be picking up
lot of dirty secrets. However, surprisingly,
we found out that almost all of the
professional Nepali websites respect
the copyrights of others. Virtually
none of the more professional website
had any material directly copied from
other Nepali websites. Please note
that even though the website did not
copy the information directly, we
found some did engage in a practice
of changing/editing already published
work to their website. We might as
well call it "doing some research."
Interestingly some professional
Nepali websites did have very obviously
copyright violations. They did not
copy any material from other Nepali
website but from non-Nepali websites.
The reason for this might be the information
is available throughout the Internet
in the same form and thus considered
to be public domain, or simply they
are just blatantly copying it. This
situation takes us back to the example
of the video stores in Nepal. Even
though, the stores are engaged in
openly renting or selling pirated
foreign movie, none of them openly
sold or rented pirated Nepali movies.
Whatever we saw
during our review was encouraging
for those of us who support a good
copyright conduct. Following a copyright
law is not just a moral or legal question
but an economic one too. We all know
that copying somebody's work might
deprive that person from any economic
benefits but a website that violates
copyright also looses its credibility
and thus ultimately looses its visitors.
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