Kettle objects to the pot calling the pan black

The legal battle between Humans of Bombay and People of India has exposed questions of originality, ethics, and commercialisation in the world of digital storytelling

So the pot called the pan black, unaware that the kettle would wake up and call the pot black! It is kind of funny what happened all of last week. The Humans of Bombay (HoB), a popular storytelling platform, filed a lawsuit against People of India (PoI), another storytelling platform, alleging that the latter had replicated the “unique” storytelling format of HoB and published identical content, including HoB’s unique intellectual property (IP) such as images and videos. The Delhi High Court duly took note of the matter. Justice Pratibha Singh, in fact, specifically mentioned that there seemed “substantial imitation”, with some photos being identical.

But then, there was suddenly an interesting twist in the tale. Brandon Stanton, founder of Humans of New York (HoNY), posted on ‘X’, saying, “I’ve stayed quiet on the appropriation of my work because I think @HumansOfBombay shares important stories, even if they’ve monetized far past anything I’d feel comfortable doing on HoNY. But you can’t be suing people for what I’ve forgiven you for.” Basically, HoNY, the original creator of the Humans photoblog idea, called HoB’s bluff saying they had copied his idea — and now the copied idea can’t claim to be an original.

“Inspired” by the HoNY website, Karishma Mehta started HoB in January 2014, by travelling around Mumbai and asking people questions about their lives. Over the years, Ms Mehta (Kari to friends) has become quite a star in her own right — HoB has done interviews with the rich-and-famous, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Ratan Tata, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Kajol & Ajay Devgan, and many more. The interesting thing is that neither the name HoB (straight copy of HoNY) nor the photo-blogging format were ever licensed from Brandon Stanton. He has said in the past that he welcomed anyone using the concept “to express something true and beautiful about their community”. So HoB is not an original idea, more importantly, not owned by Ms Mehta for sure. The Indian platform has, in fact, also faced backlash in the past week because HoB uses the same tagline as HoNY — “one story at a time” — on its X page. Most likely, without permission or authorisation.

Mr Stanton, who started HoNY in 2010, was called by the New York Magazine a “one-man philanthropy machine”. He has over the years used the platform to raise money for some of the people he profiles and for causes like hurricane victims in the US and Rohingya refugees in Southeast Asia. Ms Mehta, however, has publicly stated that HoB functions as a business that runs on ads and has collaborated with brands like Amazon, WhatsApp and Unilever for their campaigns. Which has got Mr Stanton more than upset — “they’ve monetized far past anything I’d feel comfortable doing” — said he about HoB. An analysis on the internet claims that 76 per cent of HoB’s posts are sponsored and 48.7 per cent are low effort (ghost written or sponsor-dictated). Whether entirely true or not, the fact is that philanthropy (unlike HoNY) has never been at the heart of HoB’s efforts, despite its well-cultivated goody-goody public profile.

The HoB matter is not just about “copyright of content” versus PoI. Ms Mehta has publicly stated how she “stumbled” upon the idea for HoB “completely randomly and out of the blue”, which is, of course, a complete lie. Therefore, HoB’s claim on copyright of intellectual property becomes entirely questionable when its own existence is, at best, based on a borrowed idea, if not a stolen idea. Mr Stanton could have used a “Non-Commercial License” attribution to allow others to use his work, or adaptations of their own work, for non-commercial use. He was kind enough to not do even that: He let many Humans chapters sprout up all over the world without any commercial give-or-take. Or even his approval. Mr Stanton is a photographer, he’s a storyteller, and he’s a social media phenomenon. Ms Mehta is also all that, but then she is blatantly commercial too. And that is what all the current media and social media howling is all about.

“Those are the places that have the most extreme headlines coming out,” Mr Stanton was recently quoted as saying. “Those are the places most skewed in people’s heads. The work (Stanton’s pictures) has a very humanising effect in places that are misunderstood or feared.” HoB too perhaps started out with similar objectives. But being commercial to your toe-nails cannot go hand-in-hand with being highly principled and holier-than-thou — and HoB is now getting mauled for it.

Methinks Ms Mehta overplayed her cards. And was surprised by the backlash. Making someone else’s idea your own was bad enough, but trying to edge out all competition in the category for reasons that were obviously purely commercial was not a very wise move. HoB may just have destroyed all it built in the past few years through the PoI litigation. 

The writer is chairman of Rediffusion