Adam Howitt's Blog

May 18
2006

Stop! Thief!

At : 11:38 AM | Link | Tech | Comments (9) | Send | 608 Views |

My first email in my inbox at work this morning was a note from our designer Jeff to point out that our company website DuoConsulting.com has been plagiarized by a firm in Sycamore, IL called designinspired.  I'll not provide the link to the offending website to avoid sending them further traffic and search engine prominence but here are thumbnails (click to see the larger versions).  Our version:

Duo Consulting's original layoutand now the thief's version 

The thief's home page

From the larger version, you can see that not only did they steal the layout but the copy text is the same too! All they did was comment out the links to our site and change their name, banner and copyright.  I think this is disgusting so a big thank you to CopyScape.com for their tool to help you find site thiefs!

The theft was discussed on a design list yesterday and Pulltoinflate.com blogged their own thoughts on the matter.  

Needless to say, a cease and desist email has been sent.  I've seen a similar thing with a guy from England who took it upon himself to make a duplicate of WalkJogRun with his own branding (see here) but at least he had the nuts to email me and tell me what he had done. The site isn't revenue generating for me and I have a loyal band of users so I wasn't so concerned to ask him to pull it down again but it did chap my ass a little that all of my text and all of my javascript was "reused". 

Please, if you are "inspired" by someone else's site, tab between the two and if you can't honestly say they look dramatically different you should rework it and at least have the courtesy to write your own marketing content. Especially when your layout was stolen from a competitor.

UPDATE 4:53pm: The "perpetrator" of the duo copy has not only acknowledged the post but also taken down the site and apologized which is the best we can hope for in a situation like this.  Now if anyone knows the guy in England responsible for the other copy please give him a nudge ;-)

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  1. Wow! That's pretty blatant! What's interesting too is that the logo on the other site is very similar to the whole new Quark logo that happened to be like the Scottish Arts Council and several other logos! So even the logo's kind of a rip off!!!

    Posted By Rick Curran : Posted At 5/18/06 10:50 AM
  2. Wow, that's pretty sleezy...especially stealing the copy on services to non-profits.

    Posted By Kristin : Posted At 5/18/06 11:22 AM
  3. That copyscape site is great. I just found two sites using copy from our corporate site. Very useful.

    In this case not the whole site, just paragraphs here or there. Probably some lazy lacky tasked with coming up with content.

    Great resource for teachers looking for plagerized work as well.

    Posted By Joshua Cyr : Posted At 5/18/06 11:41 AM
  4. I have to say that this doesn't really bother me at all. Sites are about content. If they look good, they look good. I look through hundreds of site for inspiration and programming knowledge and I only return to a scant few because they are the only ones with content that appeals to me.

    I borrow ideas and designs from sites. I am not a designer. If i tried to come up with something purely from my imagination, I would be cheating my clients. Disagree with me if you will, but what really bothers you about it. Think about it like it was a movie. I love action movies. Love 'em! But you know what, a lot of them are alike. They all copy each other's styles. Its a GENRE. Do I sit there and worry about the rights of one director to do something. No, I sit back and enjoy the awesome content. And if the content sucks, then guess what. Never gonna watch it again, never gonna buy the DVD.

    If someone copies someone thing you do, that should be a compilment. And it should also be a motivating force. Now, you can't sit back and feel safe... now you have to go out and make your site have an edge.

    And to rant for one more moment, worrying about people copying design is like a musician who complains that they have to tour to make money. You can't just make one good song (or site design) and site back and grow fat. You have to go out and play music (or provide high quality content) in order to make it in this world.

    Here endeth the rant.... almost... And you won't see me worrying about people taking any code that I post on message boards. Now you might think, 'yeah, but you are posting it voluntarily, for the purpose of helping'... but who paid for the info? If i learned something new on the job then shared that on CFTalk, isn't that client paying for that info?

    Ok, not really sure where I was going with that last thing. But the bottom line is that designs don't make a site... content does.

    Posted By Ben Nadel : Posted At 5/30/06 6:18 AM
  5. Had some cool-off time from my last comment and I just wanted to say that I wrote that after having to work through a holiday weekend and while silmultaneously having an argument with my girlfriend. I did not need to come off so heated. I need a nap ASAP!

    Posted By Ben Nadel : Posted At 5/30/06 6:59 AM
  6. Joshua: I'm not a developer. But let's say I completely copy an application you've created -- I don't even bother to remove your comments in the code -- and I pass it off as my own, declaring people should hire me because of my ability to create such a great application.

    You wouldn't have a problem with that? Because that's exactly what happened in this instance.

    Inspiration is not the same thing as thievery. Yes, inspiration involves borrowing ideas, no doubt. It does not involve lifting an entire design down to the code with which it was built. That's like buying a term paper from the internet. This person literally hit 'view source,' 'copy' 'paste.' Those skills generally aren't listed on most designers' resumes. I believe you'd agree that most professions require skill development. This guy tried to pass off someone else's abilities as his own. That's just plain lying.

    "...worrying about people copying design is like a musician who complains that they have to tour to make money. You can't just make one good song (or site design) and site back and grow fat. You have to go out and play music (or provide high quality content) in order to make it in this world."

    You also can't steal one from someone else and expect to grow fat off that, either.

    "Designs don't make a site... content does." They're equal components to a successful site -- but that's another discussion...

    Posted By Drew : Posted At 6/13/06 11:46 AM
  7. Sorry -- that post was meant for Ben, not Joshua.

    Posted By Drew : Posted At 6/13/06 11:47 AM
  8. To chime back in again having read your comment Ben I have to disagree. Stealing the site and changing only a couple of details is equivalent to identity theft. Duo has evolved the site thru nearly 8 revisions over the last 8 years or so. That isn't sitting back and growing fat, nor are the many fresh designs Duo's design team creates every day for our satisfied clients. To quote an email from the perp himself, he was going to a client meeting and wanted to demonstrate that he had a website. This is lying in addition to theft. It took him a couple of hours to do the rip off and the client was sufficiently impressed to hire him. This is worse because he stole the design from a competitor, not someone from a random channel like dog bowl manufacturers. It's cheap.

    Posted By Adam Howitt : Posted At 6/13/06 12:03 PM
  9. To all who commented on my comment.... I agree with you. Taking someone's site design is 'stealing'. People do work hard on their site designs and someone paid for that design.... My reaction was more that I just don't think it such a big deal... now, granted, I didn't take the idea revenue generation into account. I don't own a business nor do I sell a product, so from my perspective, the idea of having a "competitor" is not a second-nature type of thing.... as a programmer I tend to think in information, which is why I was saying that content is king and design is secondary... take for instance all of our Blogs... they all pretty much look the same. I am sure a ton of you use BlogCFC or Blogger or whatever flavor of software you like - I dont' think any of us care that this is the case... now i know that all of this has been released for people to use for free, which is really the environment that I come from, so again, like I said before, I wasn't thinking about selling products, i think about spreading information. ... ALSO, when i talked about borrowing designs, i meant merely from a visual standpoint. I did not intend to say view source, copy, paste is OK... That's not ok on any level. Where's the honor in not coding your own site?

    Posted By Ben Nadel : Posted At 6/14/06 2:35 PM
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