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I’m Tired Of Companies Ripping off our site, So I’m Calling Them Out

andresmax.com

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Re: I’m Tired Of Companies Ripping off our site, So I’m Calling Them Out

#201

Post by incongruity »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #194
incongruity wrote: post #70

I think there might be a commonality here – a number of them seem to be located in Australia (with one in India and one in the UK) – a whois check shows a few AU contacts and an AU-based whois privacy guard, so I can't be sure , but the do seem to be oddly clustered, IMHO. My bet would be that some third-party web firm/designer has sold all of these companies a "unique design" and more than likely most of them are un…

My impression, by how widespread it was, was that someone adopted it for a Wordpress theme, and it's now on Themeforest.

Perhaps – but then why the geographic coincidence/clustering I noticed in the sites cited by the author? It certainly could be just dumb luck, but it seemed unlikely.

Re: I’m Tired Of Companies Ripping off our site, So I’m Calling Them Out

#202

Post by neya »

incongruity wrote: post #195
neya wrote: post #190

Hi all, I'm a designer and I have been under a similar situation - I have been, many, many times as a designer, asked to design something exactly like what my client has showed me, which most of the times was, another site. I haven't accepted a single offer from such clients, but I know how exactly they all work. Here's how it works: 1) The client keeps stalking a particular site he likes, which is usually a competit…

This also makes it very difficult to maintain for your client and a pain in the arse for any other designer or coder who has to deal with your work. IMHO, unless your client is completely aware and onboard with this and has access to the original, un-adulterated version, you're doing a disservice to them. (I say this as a designer and coder with degrees and 10+ years of experience to back up my opinion)

I actually encourage you to do this with the final version of a back-up copy of your homepage design. Homepages rarely change, in my experience. So, it's a good compromise. Any developer is going to work-up on the un-adulterated code, not on the obfuscated version. I am sorry for not being clear about this.

Re: I’m Tired Of Companies Ripping off our site, So I’m Calling Them Out

#203

Post by ricardobeat »

neya wrote: post #190

Hi all, I'm a designer and I have been under a similar situation - I have been, many, many times as a designer, asked to design something exactly like what my client has showed me, which most of the times was, another site. I haven't accepted a single offer from such clients, but I know how exactly they all work. Here's how it works: 1) The client keeps stalking a particular site he likes, which is usually a competit…

What? You are going to

    - break your CSS by making it dependent on javascript
    - use inefficient compression, easily reversible, to "obfuscate" javascript
    - both of these slowing your page loading time
That's like the worst of DRM badly emulated in a browser. You do realize that the script which checks the URL can also be modified by the copycat? Minifying CSS+HTML+JS as usual already gets you the most benefits, while being good practice. This is shooting your own foot.

Re: I’m Tired Of Companies Ripping off our site, So I’m Calling Them Out

#204

Post by guilloiguaran »

sequoia wrote: post #173

OP is going overboard with the accusations. http://www.capta360.com http://www.creativegerms.com/about http://pearlwebstudio.com ^None of these people are "copying" him, at least visually. OP did not invent links with vertical scroll or the vertical parallax effect. OP: Clearly some of the sites outright ripped off your design, but stop trash talking sites with designs you merely think are "similar" to yours.

http://www.creativegerms.com/about and http://pearlwebstudio.com are copying the text messages

Re: I’m Tired Of Companies Ripping off our site, So I’m Calling Them Out

#205

Post by dasil003 »

We've been ripped off way worse than this. I'm talking about wholesale ripoff of a full application, not just a tiny brochure site. What must have literally been a multi-month development effort to rip off tens of thousands of lines of javascript, css and html, and building a new backend from scratch to plug it in to. Because they were an eastern bloc country there was no point in trying to prevent it or even getting upset. The way I see it it's tremendously flattering.

Re: I’m Tired Of Companies Ripping off our site, So I’m Calling Them Out

#206

Post by cscurmudgeon »

It is interesting to see how the community reacts when someone steals their work. There are some good suggestions like contacting the owners of the offending sites politely.

Quite a few of the comments seem pretty malicious in nature. Like serving up javascript which behaves mischievously. It doesn't seem to matter to these people if the site owners were victims of bad and lazy designers.

(Never mind the fact that the original design is not that original.)

I can't believe that almost the same people then go on to rage and demand, more or less in spirit, everything else be free and open. (academic papers, iOS, music etc)

Free, open and being kind are rules which are good to apply to others. Isn't it?

Re: I’m Tired Of Companies Ripping off our site, So I’m Calling Them Out

#207

Post by camus »

dasil003 wrote: post #205

We've been ripped off way worse than this. I'm talking about wholesale ripoff of a full application, not just a tiny brochure site. What must have literally been a multi-month development effort to rip off tens of thousands of lines of javascript, css and html, and building a new backend from scratch to plug it in to. Because they were an eastern bloc country there was no point in trying to prevent it or even getting…

serverside code cannot be ripped off unless there is a security flaw. If you are concerned about something people might rip off, do it serverside. All the front-end code will never be protected...

Re: I’m Tired Of Companies Ripping off our site, So I’m Calling Them Out

#208

Post by bandithouse »

robomartin wrote: post #168
mijustin wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I don't agree with this response at all. "Allow them to use the design for a small fee"? The original site design was the product of careful branding, long hours of coding, and probably countless revisions: the point of all this work is to create something that uniquely represents the company. Responding to piracy by "homogenizing" an original design isn't the answer. The rest of the business world is definitely…

The OP is a design house. Is this particular design the last drop of creative juice they have? I would think they can certainly evolve their site into another equally interesting design. It's almost like what happens to Mercedes Benz. Companies like Mitsubishi shamelessly copy MBZ designs. They've been doing it for years. MBZ's answer is to continuously innovate. Obsolete you own product.

so now you're saying they should change/evolve their design because other companies have blatantly ripped them off? it's not just "some design", it's their brand. if Mitsubishi put a MBZ logo on their car MBZ wouldn't "continuously innovate" on their logo.

Re: I’m Tired Of Companies Ripping off our site, So I’m Calling Them Out

#209

Post by dusing »

sequoia wrote: post #173

OP is going overboard with the accusations. http://www.capta360.com http://www.creativegerms.com/about http://pearlwebstudio.com ^None of these people are "copying" him, at least visually. OP did not invent links with vertical scroll or the vertical parallax effect. OP: Clearly some of the sites outright ripped off your design, but stop trash talking sites with designs you merely think are "similar" to yours.

I thought the same thing, they are pretty different. http://www.capta360.com/ is not even close. Maybe he's saying they use his js

Re: I’m Tired Of Companies Ripping off our site, So I’m Calling Them Out

#210

Post by cscurmudgeon »

robomartin wrote: post #99

I think you might just be taking the wrong approach. Shaming them is a bad idea, at least as a first move. Seek-out and contact the owners of these businesses. Point out what you have discovered. There's an outside possibility that they have no clue that their web designers have done this. They might actually feel rather embarrassed to learn so. If I couldn't code my own sites and had to rely on designers who took th…

It is interesting to see how the community reacts when someone steals their work. There are some good suggestions (e.g. the parent here) like contacting the owners of the offending sites politely.

Quite a few of the other comments seem pretty malicious in nature. Like serving up javascript which behaves mischievously. It doesn't seem to matter to these people if the site owners were victims of bad and lazy designers. (Never mind the fact that the original design is not that original.)

I can't believe that almost the same people then go on to rage and demand, more or less in spirit, everything else be free and open. (academic papers, iOS, music etc) Free, open and being kind are rules which are good to apply to others. Isn't it?

Folks, the above comment is the best way to go about it.

(Pasting an earlier top-level comment of mine as it seems to have been deluged under the anger.)

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