Blatant Rip Off

October 1, 2004

Appar­ently and unbe­knownst to me, I’ve got another site in the Nether­lands that looks com­pletely dif­fer­ent from this one save for the nav­i­ga­tion links.

All kid­ding aside, I’ve been actu­ally wait­ing for this to hap­pen. For some­one in another coun­try, or even a res­i­dent of the US of A to steal some­thing from my site, be it the nav­i­ga­tion, the lay­out, graph­ics or con­tent. In this case, this unknown per­son who I gather is from the Nether­lands, at least accord­ing to their domain appears to have just set up his or her site and in the process they’ve lifted my URLs and navigation.

I’ve seen it hap­pen to Jon Hicks, Paul Scrivens and a vari­ety of other devel­op­ers (design­ers, blog­gers, what­ever you’d like to call them).

Kudos goes to Tech­no­rati for show­ing me that links from this site were being promi­nently dis­played on another domain. I won’t lie and say it doesn’t irk me because to me this is no dif­fer­ent than steal­ing someone’s iden­tity, albeit a milder form of it.

Update: The site in ques­tion has been removed. Whether or not he or she set it up as an exper­i­ment, the fact still remains that if you plan on link­ing to another source com­pletely dif­fer­ent from your own, please be respect­ful and pro­vide credit or sim­ply email the author or designer. Many times you’ll find they will be will­ing to help you, if not allow you to use cer­tain graph­ics if proper credit is given.

 

19 comments

Way­hey! Had to hap­pen sooner or later. Looks like Kubrick as well. Maybe they are just in the process of set­ting it up and are expri­ment­ing. Still a dis­claimer and credit wouldn’t go amiss.

I’d con­tact them and point it out. If it is Kubrick he’s stripped all credit from that as well — v.rude.

by Gary on October 1, 2004 at 2:23 pm. Reply #

Gary: I knew some­thing like this was going to hap­pen, only a mat­ter of time I kept telling myself. What irks me is that this per­son is link­ing directly to my site, as if he was me. Even if they were exper­i­ment­ing, it makes sense to just change the URLs to some­thing else, rather than link­ing directly to a site.

Also, I’d con­tact them if I had a way of doing so.

by kartooner on October 1, 2004 at 2:29 pm. Reply #

Leave a com­ment on the site? If it’s accept­ing comments…

I agree with you that it’s a pain. Any idiot should have removed the links point­ing to your site…but I don’t hold out much hope after look­ing at the sites tagline…especially when he can’t spell ‘scratching’.

Update: Just left a com­ment there..

by Gary on October 1, 2004 at 3:11 pm. Reply #

Y’know… I don’t buy the “sorry, just exper­i­ment­ing” line of crap that these mouth-breathers always use. If you want to exper­i­ment, then do it pri­vately on a devel­op­ment server. Every­one can have their own pri­vate web server envi­ron­ment on their home machine using Apache.

This just smacks of des­per­a­tion and laziness.

by max on October 1, 2004 at 3:52 pm. Reply #

Yeah, I’ve cur­rently got a clone site myself right now. I’ve talked with the guy and sim­ply encour­aged him to explore fur­ther and make the design some­thing that reflects him bet­ter. I’m not sure what else I could do.

by Christian Gloddy on October 1, 2004 at 4:41 pm. Reply #

@Max, you know what…I think I agree with you there. I hap­pen to think my site is pretty generic, but I still spent ago­nis­ing hours putting together the CSS and con­tin­u­ally restyling on my home server.

by Gary on October 1, 2004 at 4:49 pm. Reply #

Hey man, sorry that really sucks — some­what flat­ter­ing though eh?

by Donnie Jeter on October 1, 2004 at 10:17 pm. Reply #

Hmm..

Your site seems sim­i­lar in con­cept to sim­plebits and many other pop­u­lar CSS and stan­dards sites. It seems to be get­ting hit pretty hard and its get­ting your name out there.

Look­ing at your style sheets, it seems you have used many pop­u­lar lay­out meth­ods that you prob­a­bily didn’t invent and don’t give credit anywhere.

I think you should just be happy some­one liked your graph­ics or what­ever instead of announc­ing to the world that some­one stole your ideas (when they are prob­a­bily not entirely yours anyhow).

Con­grats on the site though.. like the design.. I wish you had some back­ground imges that I could rip off.
;-)

by John on October 2, 2004 at 1:59 pm. Reply #

John: While I appre­ci­ate your selec­tive insight on this man­ner, maybe you should have read the arti­cle through instead of jump­ing straight to conclusions.

At no point did I state that this indi­vid­ual lifted any graph­ics or lay­out meth­ods, rather he is link­ing directly to this site and it’s page as if it were his own. To be hon­est, no one invented these meth­ods so much as shared them and I’m com­pletely fine with that. You really only do so much to the lay­out, it’s the graph­ics that take time and belong to the author respec­tively. It’s not a con­cern of mine if some­one were to tin­ker with the under­ly­ing code or CSS, I’m a firm believer that we learn bet­ter from look­ing at other people’s work, as I have done in the past.

How­ever, it makes absolutely no sense what­so­ever to link directly to a site or it’s pages as if it were your own. For exam­ple, how would you feel if you set up a site with fam­ily pho­tos or just a por­fo­lio and some­one out there linked directly to these pages (with­out giv­ing credit). If some­one were to see this, they might not under­stand that the out­side links are not part of the author’s work.

Also, I never “announced” that some­one stole my ideas, rather I made the obser­va­tion that it wouldn’t sur­prise me if some­one did. Let’s be hon­est we all “steal”, “bor­row” or “col­lab­o­rate”, what­ever you’d like to refer to it as. This site might look like Sim­plebits and other blogs (that debate has sur­faced else­where), but there are cer­tain things that I do to make it my own.

Again, I appre­ci­ate your feed­back, but under­stand that what you’re describ­ing is com­pletely dif­fer­ent from this situation.

As for back­grounds, what you’d be “steal­ing” would belong to Squidfin­gers any­way so you might as well try there first.

by kartooner on October 2, 2004 at 3:09 pm. Reply #

“like the design.. I wish you had some back­ground imges that I could rip off.”

…and that describes your posi­tion per­fectly John.

@Kartooner, good for you to explain your­self, but you didn’t need to. Sim­i­lar to a debate I saw on Airbag a cou­ple of months ago. It’s not worth point­ing it out to some people.

by Gary on October 2, 2004 at 3:24 pm. Reply #

He Kar­tooner,

After I RIPPET your top-menu and not your DESIGN, I did send you a mail! I guess you won’t reply that after the incident.

Amaz­ing how many com­ments you have for this post.
If some­body died, hehe!
So now and then every­body rips some­thing from the inter­net.
Didnt’ you when your we’re 16 years old?

Any­way, I don’t need your top menu any­more.
I think my site <a target=_blank href=http://www.sprons.nl” rel=“nofollow”>sprons.nl is ready to use!

You guys take care now, bye bye then!

by Sprons on October 4, 2004 at 8:18 am. Reply #

Didnt’ [sic] you when your we’re 16 years old?

I’m six­teen and I don’t, to be honest.

Please peo­ple, don’t get a bad image of Dutch peo­ple. We too have the usual ran­dom arse show­ing up.

And my Eng­lish isn’t that bad.

by Rob Mientjes on October 4, 2004 at 11:17 am. Reply #

Rob: No wor­ries. I myself have a hand­ful of Dutch, Scan­di­na­vian (I’m Nor­we­gian, by the way) and Swedish friends. This isn’t at all a dis­crim­i­na­tory sit­u­a­tion, rather it’s just a ques­tion of com­mon sense practice.

I should add that I admired and adapted cer­tain meth­ods when I was younger, but never did I lift spe­cific links or graph­ics for my own benefit.

We all learn from oth­ers and col­lab­o­ra­tion is key, but self­ish­ness is just dis­re­spect­ful and down­right shady.

by kartooner on October 4, 2004 at 1:25 pm. Reply #

As Sob said “We too have the usual ran­dom arse show­ing up.”

Well, here I am!
While I was surf­ing on the net I found this web­site:
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/horizontal23.htm

The css and html looks almost the same as yours, Kartooner!

by Sprons on October 5, 2004 at 7:01 am. Reply #

Sprons: I’m not going to waste my time and energy, but I will say this; of course I use meth­ods donated to the CSS com­mu­nity. We all do. It’s the only way we learn, that is we adapt cer­tain method­olo­gies, mod­ify them and ulti­mately make them our own.

My point in all this has absolutely noth­ing to do with the under­ly­ing CSS code, because to be hon­est I wouldn’t have flinched if you had copied it.

Rather, you linked directly to the sec­tions within this site as if they were your own. Can I be any more clear than that?

by kartooner on October 5, 2004 at 9:37 am. Reply #

okay, okay, that link­ing part was’nt the smarstest thing to do.
I would have change that if you were’nt so damn fast, hehe!

Any how, your web­site has a beau­ti­full WP design and I respect that!
There’s no such thing as steal­ing someone’s design, style or script.
The next time I will ask for it ;)

I like your avatar plu­gin, or should I say gra­vatar!
Can you tell/mail me how you put the gra­vatar script in your wp-comments.php? <- still think­ing your using that one.

Thnx and maybe later!

by sprons on October 5, 2004 at 12:53 pm. Reply #

Sprons: To imple­ment Gra­vatar into Word­Press fol­low this link: Word­Press Gra­vatar Plugin

After enabling the plug-in it’s a sim­ple cut and paste of the PHP code and you’re all set.

by kartooner on October 5, 2004 at 1:24 pm. Reply #

Hey, it’s not all bad — at least its a pos­i­tive indi­ca­tion that you’ve ‘made it’. Not every­one get’s their sites ripped ;-)

by Richard@Home on October 10, 2004 at 11:12 am. Reply #

[…] Copy­cats can be very bad, but some­times it’s just too much. I recall Erik Sagen’s kar­tooner and Ethan Marcotte’s Sidesh0w. They just slipped into my brain, and it pisses me off. I’ve copied the code of A List Apart once, be it only for the float. And that wasn’t the way I wanted it, so I made my own. Copy­ing helps you learn, but please, be inspired, not a copier. […]

by Imitation and flattery [rebelpixel productions] on October 19, 2005 at 1:41 pm. Reply #

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