When I read that little purport , it made me remember what an indian acquaintance told me some years ago:
He explained to me that in India the Biharis have a somewhat not so glorious reputation , that a lot of them engage in dishonest affairs , thievery etc ...

Some years later, not so long ago , I learned then from different sources that Narayan Maharaj ( who is from Bihar ) has been plagiarizing the books of Ananta Das babaji , without giving credits ...
Now is this gentlemanly behaviour ? Vaishnava-achara ?
Or is it maybe the propensity of some Biharis ...

PS : As far as I know , in the "karmi"-world ( ) , this is a punishable action .

Moreover it is said that Bhaktivedanta Swami did also copy word for word of other commentators . ( sometimes without giving credit )
But it seems that the commentaries he used , were from already deceased acharyas , and they were from his line ( so it seems not to be an issue ) ; whereas it is a known fact that Narayan Maharaj is very eloquent at critizising Babajis or traditional vaishnavas ...

So , why plagiarize their texts in the first place ?

It is an issue.

Copyright laws in most countries of the world that are members of the Berne Convention and/or the Universal Copyright Convention hold that the copyright remains until a minumum of 50 years after the creator's death. Member countries establish themselves what they add to that minimum. In many countries it is 70 years. So, for sure the copyright of authors who died after 1955 still stands.

Indian copyright law states:

"Except as otherwise hereinafter provided, copyright shall subsist in any literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work (other than a photograph) published within the lifetime of the author until fifty years from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year in which the author dies. Reference to the author shall, in the case of a work of joint authorship, be construed as a reference to the author who dies last."

In addition, publishers who create a particular edition of a public domain work (the copyright of which is expired) can and usually will put a copyright on that edition. This means that often only the copyright to original editions created during the creator's lifetime stand to run out 50 to 70 years after his/her death.

So the original texts of the Gita, Bhagavatam, etc. are all in the public domain, but the various editions with commentaries etc. are bound to the translators, compilers and publishers. For instance, Radhakrishnan's Bhagavad Gita translation (of which many of the Bhagavad Gita As It Is translations were apparently taken) is still under copyright protection -- likely until 2025, because Radhakrishnan died in 1975. The same for other source materials that were quoted verbatim beyond what would be considered "fair use" and to which copyrights still apply.

I have now been making some little research about this Radhakrishnan-thing , and I stumbled across one of these fantastic sarcastic Bhaktivedanta-creations : When talking about the Gita of Radhakrishnan , he uses the expression " nonsense-purports" .

What I could grasp so far from the links I visited , ACBS was quite open about copying translations of other editions , because he cared more about his own purports ( and not about translations ) , which according to him , were "authorized" , "as-it-is" , in short delivering the real truth about bhakti ; as opposed to the commentaries of the impersonalists , like Radhakrishnan was one in the eyes of ACBS .

I wonder however if any of the inheritants of the rights of Radhakrishnan´s works has ever tried to sue ACBS , The BBT or Iskcon , because of that apparent violation of copyright .

Or is it that this rather loose attitude vis-a-vis the artistic ownership of texts and translations , is part of indian culture ...

We could tell them about it.


ePiTau would be the person to comment on this.

bs would say radhakrishna didn't understand vedic philosophy on one hand and plagiarize him on the other

jesus taught for the left hand to not know what the right hand gives in charity

Well it's possible to know sanskrit well and not understand and it's possible to not want to bother with your own sanskrit translation or even know sanskrit that well but understand.

Unless understanding is all about being an excellent reader and translator.

Such a trend of blurring the boundaries of intellectual property is present in western culture as well via people like Marcel Duchamp and later more cripsly with the Neoists. Maybe Prabhupada is a Neoist :> According to Neoism you don't even need to be working from within Neoism to be enacting Neoism. I am personally not a fan of those too hung up on intellectual property and the commodification of ideas that goes along with all that. As Stewart Home explains in his book Neoism, Plagiarism and Praxis:

"Plagiarism enriches human language. It is a collective undertaking far removed from the post-modern "theories" of appropriation. Plagiarism implies a sense of history and leads to progressive social transformation..." !!!!

QUOTE (evakurvan @ Nov 3 2005, 06:10 PM)

Such a trend of blurring the boundaries of intellectual property is present in western culture as well via people like Marcel Duchamp and later more cripsly with the Neoists. Maybe Prabhupada is a Neoist :> According to Neoism you don't even need to be working from within Neoism to be enacting Neoism. I am personally not a fan of those too hung up on intellectual property and the commodification of ideas that goes along with all that. As Stewart Home explains in his book Neoism, Plagiarism and Praxis:

"Plagiarism enriches human language. It is a collective undertaking far removed from the post-modern "theories" of appropriation. Plagiarism implies a sense of history and leads to progressive social transformation..." !!!!

Everything has already been said under the sun. So in a way everybody is quilty of plagiarism. Most authors just try to say things in a new and fresh way, maybe try to find a new angle, their own, so to say. Perhaps ACBS was so busy he just plagiated whatever he wanted? Maybe he was so dum that he was not able to develope his own angle? Maybe that what he saw in the above mentioned books and translations was put into words so nicely, he saw no reason to change it? Maybe that is why he kept repeating that he is only a parrot?

Maybe they wouldn´t even care , because they are above such petty things .
After all , as bona-fide monists , wouldn´t everything be seen by them as one , whatsoever ?...

One thing that didn't seem right to me was that in the BBT translations the name of a translator was never mentioned. Although legally these were works performed for hire, i.e., translator concedes his copyrights to the company, according to the copyright law autorship is one of the fundamental rights that can never be taken away; and a translator always has a right to be acknowledged as such. But in the BBT it was only Bhaktivedanta Swami who were always given all credit as if translators did not even existed as a persons.

The acknowledgment of this important service done by various devotees and non-devotees was very much missing. Not that anybody in the BBT was demanding this attention and glorification. On the contrary, everbody I knew there was very humble. Still I view this non-appreciation as a symptomatic neglect of devotees who did their best to serve in the BBT and ISKCON. Yes, book distributors sometimes got their moments of fame but I suspect that was more about the money they collected. We didn't hear much about wonderful pujaris, for example.

Is this true? I have a recollection that the translator was credited in one of the Danish translations.

Yes. The translator of the Danish edition of BhagavadgItA (Lizanne Tester) is credited, see here.

That being said, then perhaps there was no consistent policy of crediting translators.

There were exceptions but when I joined the BBT it was rarely done. In fact, I don't know of BBT books in Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian books and some other languages which credits translators. It was not allowed. When I inquired about this I was told that it is done to avoid potential future lawsuits from translators who may sue for copyright royalties when they leave ISKCON. I found this explanation rather bizare because work for hire translations are done in many cases for many publishers and they never have a problem with crediting translators.

The Polish BBT crew once reqested thay they be allowed to put translator's name in a book, the argument was that academics don't take books seriously without it. That was at times true. There were some negative news articles remarking on this lack of openness (and proceeding to point out weaknesses in the translations. ) But the BBT authorities did not grant the request, as going against the BBT policy. I don't remember what the reason given was.

The Hungarian BBT had the translator's name (devotee name) published in a Bhagavad-gita of theirs.

As far as I remember , some german books give credit to the translator Atma-tattva Das , a swiss Harikesha disciple , with "karmi"-name Armin Risi .
In the last years he has become one of the rising stars of the esoteric-scene ( bestselling books about conspiracy-theories )

I will check out when I come home .

When the first Finnish SB came out, we had our names as translators in the book and were pretty happy about it. Unfortunately the book was printed in bad quality and the pages fell apart. In the next printing our names were no longer there. We thought that God did not want to have our fillthy little lusty names in a holy book and thus the new printing had to occur. Nicely programmed, eh?

I demand that a portion of the proceeds for all the BBT books I distributed be sent to the estate of Dr. Radhakrishnan immediately

To me it looks like all it takes is a religious leader (and not just Hindoo) getting convinced enough that god whispers in his mind. Then everything goes. For, after all, when Mr. De reproduces a long passage that he took from the writings of his own guroid, but neglects to tell his readers where the nectar came from, it only means that Mr. De knew that god told the stuff to Mr. Dutt, and now the same god "authorizes" him to reuse that material. When Hayagriva challenged Mr. De--who had proposed that one could just copy Radhakrishnan's English Gita translation--De retorted, "It is Krishna's Gita! Not Radhakrishnan's Gita!" God's man can use god's property. A religious leader of that sort never has a problem quoting (without reference) any passage that describes "the truth," because the truth is god's understanding, and the humble sage knows for a fact that his deep understanding of matters true comes from greatest ever guroo.

Doucement bébé!
The Radhakrishnan case is not very strong. Even if Mr. De originally took lots from RK, these texts have been sufficiently edited to no longer be "almost" identical. Drop the RK case. However, if you need a case, take up the "Shastri & Goswami" case! M.A. Shastri and C.L. Goswami are the translators of the 1971 English Gita-Press edition of the Bhagavata-Purana. Their translation was availabe even earlier in shorter editions (1971 came the two volume edition). Mr. De copied a couple of chapters in the Third Canto "verbatim" from Shastri and Gosvami. Funny enough, in some cases, where he took objection to their "mayavada" views, he rants and raves about certain evil mayavadins who think that god is the self. In those cases one can almost always trace the evil mayavadins back to Shastri and Goswami, who translated Atman as "the self", while De wanted to have a sPoG there.

Ok , I checked some german books , and the majority gives credit to the translators .
However , I found Atma-Tattva Das only in the fifth canto of the Bhagbatam .

its all forgiveable, everyone has a bad de now and then