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From David Mcclure "have spoken to Curebit founder Allan Grant, he has taken down the pages with Highrise assets. he's also now drafting a public response. needless to say, he is re-thinking recent behavior. although i'm sure DHH will not forget the transgression, but hope he may allow them opportunity to show they can learn from their mistakes & change."
What I get from this situation is that the people over at 37 Signals are unfortunately, large kids, from the tweets present in the article. I see companies copying other companies' work all the time and although that's morally wrong, I also don't see how some lines of html are going to be the a relevant part of a company. (and if they are... bad news) What I don't see everyday is this kind of immature responses from…
This is wholesale ripping off (in particular, indicated by the direct linking to 37signals site assets). I would be pissed off too if I found that my bandwidth was being used to serve another company's site. Especially if the site was for a competitor. This is more than just design copying
Is DHH as pissed off at Elance for the blatant copy?
There's a difference between eLance's "inspiration" and actually referencing hosted images & code that CureBit did, but it's not a night and day difference.
Murky territory with us all copying eachother's moments of brilliance, but I don't think curebit deserves the full bodyslam, "scumbag" treatment.
When 37Signals wrote a blog post showing this design style outrageously improved conversions they must have expected that lots of folks would copycat. Is DHH as pissed off at Elance for the blatant copy? https://www.elance.com/ There's a difference between eLance's "inspiration" and actually referencing hosted images & code that CureBit did, but it's not a night and day difference. Murky territory with us all copying…
What Curebit did DEFINITELY qualifies as scumbag. There's some unknown tangible cost for 37signals (in the form of bandwidth, hosting assets for a competitor's site). There are small claims court cases considering similar situations nearly every day.
I learned an important lesson a few years ago: sometimes you can't make something better, and trying to make it better only makes it worse.
Stop, regroup with others and get a proper plan together.
Some of the reactions here are fascinating. As a group, HNers prize the freedom to copy from others and the ethic of helping others --- but for some, it seems to be "I get to copy from others, but no one else is allowed to copy from me."
EDIT 1: That said, from a purely-practical perspective it's usually better and cheaper to steer clear of controversy (depending on how you think the PR scales will tip). Curebit might have been better off had it not copied what it did, not least because this controversy is sucking up management time that could probably be put to better use.
EDIT 2: Plus, stealing someone else's bandwidth by linking directly to their copies of images, etc., without permission does cross the line, if that's what Curebit did.
EDIT 3: Even copying HTML and CSS might not constitute copyright infringement if there are only a limited number of ways to express the same idea(s). This is even more the case if there's an optimal way to code a given set of ideas.
They lost me when they started copying the HTML VERBATIM. Apparently they don't have capable developers either. The layout in question is not that complicated, and I'm struck on why they decided to do what they did. Even in A/B testing you could've mocked this thing up in a few hours and had it ready to go.
Inexcusable.