Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Update: The matter is now closed. If you read this post, please do read the required apology and Amit's clarification

This is the strangest case of "mirroring" anyone's noticed on the blogosphere. A blog-post complete with comments has been reproduced on a different blog. Later, this turned out to be serial behaviour. Could it be that Plagiarism has hit the blogosphere?

Read about it on Amit's blog. Amit happened to discover that an entire post from Shanti Mangala has been lifted to this blog. A flurry of emails among a few bloggers debated what to do about this. No innocent explanation could be deduced, so it was decided to give this Rohan Pinto a chance to set the record straight or to delete the offending posts/credit the originals.

No replies were received, so some of the bloggers decided to go public. We know that blogs aren't mainstream media yet, however, our content (good or bad) is important to us and flattered initially as we might be, the principles of fairness demand this right to recognition be preserved. Personally, I find this sort of blatant copying so bizarre (why would anyone lift innocuous personal blog posts!) - so bizarre that I'm still waiting for an alternative reasonable explanation.

Interestingly, I was planning a post last week (before work forced a complete shutdown of blogging activities) on the possibilities of bloggers being forced to confront journalistic realities. We've heard how blogging is giving rise to alternative (still amateur) journalists. Will a day come when the top bloggers are sought by product-makers to quietly promote/endorse among blogging circles? Right now, I give more weight to the opinion of a friendly blogger than any reviewer or ad gimmick. Or what do you do about bloggers fuelling rumours (even w/o malafide intentions) to maintain popularity?

All that for a different post I guess. This one is about why Mr. Pinto is making copies of content without credit. We still don't know for sure, but right now we have got to treat it as being intentional. This is not a witchhunt, but an attempt to nip this sort of thing in the bud, or to at least not take it silently. But the lines here are really blurred. Do I have to get a Creative Commons License?