It's not flattery, it's plagiarism

Published 22 July 06 by Justin French, 21 comments

Compare [site removed] to a website I designed, TextDrive.com. Looks familiar, eh? Digging through the XHTML and CSS, it clear to me that this is a derivative work.

Before you go hurling email insults at them like a good little army of copyright enforcers, I have emailed them, and we’ll see how they respond.

The interesting thing really is that the visual style, XHTML and CSS for my TextDrive redesign has been “stolen” like this three times (that I know of) already. Each time…

• they claimed full copyright ownership (of course)
• it was for an IT or web design company claiming to offer web design services
• they managed to take what I think (in my biassed opinion) is a quite beautiful, minimalist design and just make it so damn ugly.

It’s not flattering at all. I can’t imagine any designer seeing variations of their stuff out there on the web and thinking “hey, cool, they took hours and hours of my hard work, tweaked a few lines and claimed it as their own”.

Update: The redesigned website is live. Case closed. I’ve removed all references to the site and company involved, because there’s no point living in the past.