Plagiarism
We’ve all heard it before, plagiarism should be taken as a form of flattery. Someone has decided that your work is so good that they cannot do any better and have therefore decided to take it upon themselves to right click > view source > select all and paste into the text editor of their choice.
This is a topic which I have always wondered how I would handle, if the truth be told I wished it was something that I would never have to find out. However, recently I’ve had to deal with this and I now know that I do not see it as a form of flattery at all.
I’m sure we’ve all seen some form of rip off whether it be Dan Cederholms problems with LogoMaid or more recently with Tim Van Damme’ business card website.
As a designer you will have spent hours wireframing, prototyping, crafting your pixels and countless hours tweaking small elements within your site until it is sitting perfectly.
To find out someone has copied your work, is a kick in the teeth. They have managed to recreated your site in a matter of minutes and with a few alterations to content and logo etc. they are able to fool other people into thinking that it is all their own work.
I’m not sure what I’ll actually do regarding this blatant copy, I think it would probably be best to sit on it for a while and see how things progress. If you have had a similar problem please leave a comment highlighting how you tackled the issue.
Sadly they haven’t hot linked anything so I can’t do ‘A Tim’ and swap an important image like the background for a picture of The Hoff.
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Who I am
My name is Jack Osborne and I am a Glasgow–based designer and writer. You should follow me on Twitter.
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What I do
I am a front-end developer with proficiency in; accessibility, design, semantics, usability & web standards.
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Where I do it
I am currently working freelance and I am available for hire. Feel free to get in touch with me if you fancy a chat.
I know you said you wanted to wait until you can see how everything progresses but I would urge you to act quickly to make sure the thief is dealt with accordingly.
@John
That seems to be the general consensus on Twitter. Cole Henley pointed me in the direction of http://www.copyscape.com/respond.php which is definately something for me to look into.
Another message suggested I should obtain their details through the whois registrars and contact their hosting company directly and let them deal with it.
Why not post a link to the site in question? Seems strange that you don’t. Take a screengrab and post it on flickr. Tell everyone and get them to take a look at the site.
@Matt
Cheers for commenting the blog! There are two reasons why I’ve yet to name and shame
1, The site in question isn’t actually live, it seems to be in a folder off the root. The only reason I stumbled across it was because the person in question forgot to take out my mint script.
2, My second reason for not doing anything is because they seem to be of a relatively young age, in the about section they mention attending a college.
I’ll obviously keep my eye on them and see how things progress, I’ve got a screenshot of how things currently are, if they used it as a starting point and progress it from there then I don’t see the harm in that. However if nothing changes I’ll definately be using social networks to spread the word.
I’ve had this happen twice in the past 6 months.
The first was when a toy shop competitor ripped off all our layouts and banner styles. Sadly it was too expensive to do anything other than send a firm legal letter, which got zero response. Instead I’m using this as motivation to come up with something bigger and better.
Second up was with a corporate client who had an email newsletter ripped off. They simply laughed it off and did nothing, which to say the least was very strange in comparison to the smaller toy stores reaction.
However in regards to your problem, I’d leave it a while to see what happens. Hopefully they are just using your site to learn how to do things properly.
@Richard
Regarding your first case I can understand someone ignoring letters hoping everything will disappear or hope that you will lose interest but for someone to laugh off blatant plagiarism, in the case of your second thief, it is a very strange approach to take.
Surely they will know that all the work you have produced will be time stamped etc. They really don’t have a leg to stand on.
With regards to my problem there seems to be very little development work happening on the site, perhaps they’ve read this post?
I really liked this post. Can I copy it to my site? Thank you in advance.
@Kris not sure if that was a joke or not but seeing as you asked before taking it I can’t see why not