Vodafone takes Rupee without credit
By Bala Shah

Vodafone Essar is the Indian subsidiary of Vodafone Group and commenced operations in 1994 when its predecessor Hutchison Telecom acquired the cellular license for Mumbai. The company now has operations across the country with over 106 million customers. Vodafone is the world's leading international mobile communications group with approximately 350 million customers in 2010.

In India, Vodafone generated many good vibes with their brilliant Zoozoos advertising campaign.

But it seems there are rogue elements in Vodafone India who are happy to steal the ideas of others without giving due credit.

Regular readers of Techgoss are well aware that a large number of our articles are crowd sourced.  People send in tips, story ideas and even articles. Many of our contributors have full times jobs in IT-ITES, and so prefer using a pseudonym.  A Tipster wrote in to Techgoss

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Two bright young techies from Pune, Aman Jain and Meher Ranjan, created WebRupee.com which is a simple and useful web service for web publishers to add the new Rupee symbol to their web pages in such a way that it is very easy for the web publisher to use; and if users copy-paste the content from the webpage to somewhere else (where the new Rupee symbol would otherwise not show), it would automatically get converted to "Rs".

And these clever techies made it a free service to help make the life of Indians simpler. In fact, they've released it under the Apache Licence, which means that if anyone wants to copy their code and font files they can do that for free - all they ask is that they should be acknowledged.

It appears that Vodafone not only stole their font, but the bad elements within Vodafone did not even attribute the source as required legally by the license. And they even tried to hide their theft by changing the file names and other minor tweaks.
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Techgoss double checked and found our Tipster was on the money.  This blog post details all the evidence

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Vodafone Steals WebRupee’s Font Without Acknowledging It!

Bitten by the MNP bug, I was checking out some GSM provider’s website and what they have to offer. While browsing Vodafone’s website it was really nice to see that they used the Rupee Symbol instead of writing “Rs”. Out of curiosity, I started checking how was the symbol displayed and found that the stylesheet looked like the one from WebRupee with few changes:

1) Licence Removed (We had Apache Version 2 license)
2) “WebRupee” changed to “rupee”
3) Links to font file on their server
4) Almost all css same (even the whitespaces) except for the places where they had added some small styling information.

I was still unsure whether the font was copied, so I downloaded the font file to check. And the above screenshot verified it.

So they not only stole the files but were devious enough to change the name. They should really learn from railtourismindia.com, blanketofrelief.org that have been using it without changing the name.

Not only them, rimweb.com has been using it from their own servers, but have left the Licences untouched.
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