What does the Humans of Bombay controversy say about art and profit motives?

After Humans of Bombay brought suit againstPeople of India for copyright infringement, Humans of New York founder Brandon Stanton publicly highlighted the irony of a copycat account suing another copycat account

A young American finds an antidote for a lifetime of loneliness when he begins dating. A farmer from Maharashtra strives to make enough money to visit his son and grandchild in Mumbai every Ganesh Chaturthi. A teenager survived chronic kidney disease after his father donated one of his own. The latest Instagram posts on the pages of Humans of New York (HoNY), Humans of Bombay (HoB), andPeople of India (PoI) are all about relationships—moving, sentimental, mostly uplifting stories of human connection, love, and sacrifice.

In real life, Humans of New York (founded by Brandon Stanton in 2010), and its imitations Humans of Bombay (founded by Karishma Mehta in 2014) and People of India (2020), are presently entangled in an ugly three-way skirmish, involving lawsuits, barbed comments, and serious accusations. For the uninitiated, after Humans of Bombay brought suit againstPeople of India for copyright infringement, Stanton registered his disapproval on Twitter (now ‘X’), highlighting the irony of a copycat account suing another copycat account.   

Imitation always the best form of flattery?

HoB and POI are hardly the only ones to take a format that clicked for Stanton 13 years ago as a Facebook page. There are “humans of” chapters from Sydney to Amsterdam, Singapore to Hyderabad, Kerala to Jabalpur—all of which present more or less the same kind of storytelling. The concept is not even confined to geography, stretched into identity and twisted into a catchhold for all kinds of solidarity. Think Humans of Cinema (“cinema for change, positivity and mental health”; 334K followers), Humans of Corporate (therapeutic centre for corporate woes; 201K followers) and, bizarrely, Humans of Wagyu (an account dedicated to Japanese gourmet beef ; 375K followers).

“Everybody copies each other on the Internet, at least from the point of view of an idea,” says popular Instagram and Twitter (‘X’) account Mumbai Paused creator Gopal MS. “But you have to do something that is original.” Indeed, in a sense, social media is just one long rotating funhouse of mirrors. You could draw a straight line between YouTubers Jenna Marbles, Lilly Singh and Prajakta Koli—all stars who built empires on the back of creating relatable, funny content. And perhaps another one through lifestyle vloggers like Sherry Shroff, Sejal Kumar and Sakshi Shivdasani.       

Diet Sabya and Hanan Besovic’s (aka @ideservecouture) careers would likely not have taken off if Diet Prada hadn’t created the mould for fashion criticism on social media. Popular Instagram accounts like Raja Ravi Varma Memes, Mad Mughal Memes, Texts from Your Existentialist and now, actor Brian Morabito’s weird painting-skit-reels, all owe their existence, one way or another, to Classical Art Memes, a Facebook page set up in 2014. 

Accounts that combine art and quotes, like The Artidote, Terribly Tiny Tales, ArtLeove, The Architexture—and many more—are all purveyors of #thoughtoftheday. Gopal admits that he didn’t invent the idea of photographing the everydayness of cities. It’s the kind of flânerie that has existed for over a century, and that had its own burst on social media circa 2010. 

“Mumbai Paused was born in the same year as Humans of New York,” he recalls, “and Mayank Austen Soofi’s The Delhi Walla also launched around then. I shoot in my own way, while Mayank writes beautifully. And Stanton has his unique format for ‘people’ stories. He seemed to have extraordinary empathy.” 

But look at the content around travel, fitness, skincare, and food on Instagram Reels—it is highly standardised, featuring the same fonts, hooks, filters, and songs. Look at Reels— a blatant copy of TikTok’s winning formula, which emerged from Snapchat Stories—and before that, the app Vine. When everything, from the platforms to their viral content, is templatised—when duplication is encouraged—how do we navigate lofty ideas of intellectual property and ownership on social media? 

Taking the legal route

First, the legalese. According to Indian law, “Although ideas per se are not protectable by copyright,” explains Delhi-based intellectual property rights attorney Pravin Anand. “if they have been developed to a sufficient extent and fleshed out with enough creativity, they may be the subject matter of copyright.”

‘Sufficient’ is the operative word here, furthers Anand, because the expression of an idea is protected by law, not the idea itself. To illustrate, he recalls the “Swayamvar case” of 2002. He represented Anil Gupta (founding member of the Indian Broadcasters Association and a producer associated with serials such as Buniyaad and Rajni) and his wife in a case against Sony TV. The latter tried to produce a swayamvar-style reality show on national TV in collaboration with actor Madhuri Dixit after they had rejected Gupta’s developed idea. They won on account of “expression,” against the defence’s argument for the concept of swayamvar’s existence in Indian culture and history.  

“In this case before the Delhi High Court, it appears that apart from certain expressive works, even the concept has been copied,” says Anand, who recently represented actor Anil Kapoor in his fight for personality rights against AI misuse. “The same law and statutes apply to social media as in the brick-and-mortar world. However, with the advent of the Internet and social media, enforcement of intellectual property has become more onerous.” 

For filmmaker and writer Paromita Vohra, “This will remain an area of ethics, very hard to grasp by law. It isn’t unique to social media. It has always existed under mechanical reproduction. The moment it became possible to reproduce, people began to plagiarise. And as soon as the concept of copyright was introduced, people began to violate it.” 

Merely seeking inspiration?

It has happened with Agents of Ishq (AoI), Vohra’s multimedia project that celebrates sex, love, and desire. “We have tracked the visuality of similar accounts to ours from 2015 to the present,” she says. “We can show you how they start looking like clones of AoI. We developed a communicative style that took a huge amount of labour and artistic ability. Now that we have managed to make it an explicit and articulated vernacular, other people find it easy to copy.” 

The format of Humans of New York is arguably even easier to copy—clicking portraits of people along with long passages telling their stories is a one-person job. In itself, Stanton’s chosen format isn’t original either: Simply look at the age-old practice of documenting street style. “These are formats older than the Internet,” says Vohra. “But they do keep recurring on the Internet—which allows a certain kind of content that is character-driven and emotionally manipulative to go viral.” 

It helps that these posts are simple and clear in communication. “They aren’t complex to make, they are complex in thought. HoNY is predicated on the idea of New York as a place that is made of incredibly colourful, diverse people. They exemplify a certain New York way of being. Is Humans of Bombay able to achieve that? I’m not sure,” says Vohra.  

Some believe that the Humans of Bombay versus People of India case in front of the Delhi High Court might go some way in defining these limits— between inspiration and copying, original and unique. “Since just one hearing has taken place till now, wherein the complaint was registered as a commercial suit, it’ll be interesting to see arguments from both sides,” says Raunaq Bali, a Bar & Bench reporter and student at Faculty of Law, University of Delhi.

Whose story is it anyway?

Bali was among the first on ‘X’ to note that HoB’s case against PoI might actually have legs. But there are questions to be answered: “Did HoB and the interviewees sign any contracts for exclusive rights to report the life stories of those people? Did PoI take any permissions from the people they featured on their page? Did the people themselves send their photos and messages to both HoB and PoI without disclosing that they had shared these with multiple platforms? Can there be a legal right to report a life story to the exclusion of another person or entity?” 

October will perhaps bring some answers. Stanton, however, wasn’t about to let his case rest. In a followup statement, he announced that in the 13 years that HoNY has been alive, he had not received a penny for a single story told on the platform. “When art begins with a profit motive, it ceases to become art. It becomes a product.” 

A New York Magazine profile on Stanton from 2022 noted that HoNY posts did include asks: “Through GoFundMe campaigns attached to certain posts, Stanton has raised nearly US$8 million over the past 18 months for, among others, a retired burlesque dancer (US$2.7 million), the immigrant owners of an organic bakery with a chronically ill child (US$1.2 million), a man blinded by a screwdriver in a subway attack (US$677,000), and a woman undergoing breast-cancer treatment who was behind on her rent (US$498,000).”    

Meanwhile, if a  “Standard Rate Card” floating around on ‘X’ is to be believed, Humans of Bombay would charge anywhere between ₹ 12,500 for a paid spot on their Instagram or Facebook Stories, to ₹ 10,20,000 for a package deal (with a 15 per cent discount!) for six posts across two platforms. “This is what HoB was trying to achieve 6-7 years ago,” tweeted film-marketing professional Jahan Singh Bakshi, who received the creative from someone working at a film production house, and is certain this was sent out to many companies and brands since. “I’m sure their goals are substantially higher now.”      

Say it as it is

“I was a little surprised that so many people on Twitter (now ‘X’) were so surprised that a lot of Humans of Bombay is paid content,” says Gopal. His own channel doesn’t make him money; that he does from his day job in advertising and the odd photography commission. “I wouldn’t use my handle to promote paid assignments over my channel. I tell Bombay stories and the minute I put something that is monetised, I lose followers. But I have no problems with people monetising content. It comes with its pitfalls, but you need to be transparent.”

Vohra suggests looking at it “through the relationship of capitalism and cultural production/ expression”, as she wrote in a post on her Instagram. along with a clip from her 2011 film Partners in Crime. The documentary looked at copyright battles between recording companies HMV Sa Re Ga Ma and T-Series, to consider the question: Who owns a song, the person who made it or the person who paid for it? 

“When you begin to create content in this commercial way,” says Vohra, “you have to make a lot of it, and very fast, to maintain profitability. These kinds of content creation spaces become untethered from their point of origin as they proceed.” 

As the HoB skewering continued, some users on ‘X’ reported personal experiences with the team—a Muslim woman who was asked to talk about being discriminated against; a queer person who would rather talk about their cause than themself, who ended up being not featured. In this framework, people get reduced to stereotypes, and their stories, shaved of nuance, dumbed down into the “transformative experience” template, says Vohra. “That creates a deep unease in people.” 

There are other, similar instances of human stories that have been monetised, that have been making audiences uncomfortable lately. Think of the outrage at stand-up comedian Hasan Minhaj’s confession about the “emotional truths”, not actual real-life incidents, at the heart of his monologues. Or the support for Dalit writer Yashica Dutt when she claimed a character on the popular series Made in Heaven was based on her life story without giving credit. 

“The internet muddies the ethical framework,” says Vohra. In all of the above cases, someone (the audience or the protagonist) was left feeling manipulated, unacknowledged and underserved. “The fact is we all know where we got an idea from. How we acknowledge that is very important.” 

From a content creator’s point of view, Anand suggests paying attention to the finer print, reading terms of use, licensing content, or ensuring what is used is actually in the public domain (that it exists on a public platform doesn’t automatically make it so). Gopal mentions flagging content as #sponcon for, if nothing else, not letting your own brand get diluted. 

Perhaps, if Humans of Bombay had paid homage to HoNY—as a lot of the creators and influencers listed in this story have done—they wouldn’t be under the scanner right now. But perhaps, this incident will also prompt a new consideration. In Vohra’s words: “Capitalising on real-life stories—what is the actual cost of that?”

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