11–20 of 289 posts
Make a premium WordPress theme based on this design, slap a price on it, and distribute through WordPress theme sites thereby creating an additional income stream for your company. I'm in Miami and I'd be happy to help.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? Pehaps you could reference these guys on your site as evidence of love for your design chops :) Incidently - did you check whether these are individul copies or multiple clones by one person/organisation? Anyway, if assets are being hotlinked you could have some fun...
Exactly. It's a really nice layout, but honestly -- should the essence here (full page photo, small menu at top right, logo at top left, Title/quote in middle with "more info" button) really be "protectable" IP? I just don't see it, sorry. That doesn't make those designers (or probably just one) honorable or talented or honest. But they have the right to clone layouts too.
For the other guys, talk to a lawyer or just someone who knows "legalese" well enough to formulate a serious sounding email complaining about copyright infringement and threatening with a lawsuit. And have someone with a title of "copyright lawyer" or "IP legal consultant"or anything along the lines co-sign that email. They will shit their pants and change their design (they probably hired a freelancer that copied your work...). Unless they're based in a place forsaken by the IP gods, like China or Russia, then it might get too complicated to be worth the effort on your side...
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? Pehaps you could reference these guys on your site as evidence of love for your design chops :) Incidently - did you check whether these are individul copies or multiple clones by one person/organisation? Anyway, if assets are being hotlinked you could have some fun...
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You provided the links to those websites, and added that you're not sure how to proceed. From your post, I get the impression that you have not yet spoken to those companies about it. That would be a good start.
1) What if someone took their design, created a template of it, and sold it on a number of website template sites - and these companies were none-the-wiser.
2) Was the design created in-house, or did they hire a designer? Some designers claim the design was all of their own doing, but it was quite obvious they "borrowed" from a template site first.
Trouble is - web site design is very fashion oriented. You can tell a 2011 site from a 2012 site. I find a lot of sites are very similar and put it down to a common fashion more often than copying. Font selection, icon colours and general layout is bound to "cluster" around a limited range of values at the leading edge. Look at the "please review our start-up" requests here on HN - most of those web sites pretty near…
I always feel like its a flash website at first :P But yeah, I didn't realize either so many just flat out copy website designs. I guess this is a pretty common thing now :(