Factory in Midland

We’ve all seen examples of where someone has used so much ‘borrowing’ from someone else’s work that it moves from inspiration to plain old theft.

I’ve been lucky to date that there’s been some infringements, that’s for sure, but nothing overly obvious as to be an outright theft.

Well, that changed about a month ago, when I became aware of another website which was more than similar to the Bam Creative website. In fact, the offending website;

  • Uses a fair amount of the graphics I created
  • Uses the same colour schemes, fonts, type sizes and widths, etc
  • Uses our entire CSS file, including comments I left in there for fellow staff to follow
  • This site also has pages that match word for word what our sites says
  • Uses our HTML files, albeit with a few of our sections commented out
  • Uses most of our comments and meta data, without any change

The saddest part is that the offending website seems to have been produced by another web company, which I imagine, have charged the client for the work.

Whatever happened to professional pride and the desire to create your own design?

It makes me so angry when another person, who I would imagine sees themselves as a web professional, takes my hard work, image by image, word for word and rips off the entire thing.

It makes me even angrier to imagine that the client of this company has paid their hard earned money for their web company to be the laziest, dumbest bunch of misfits to go out and thieve someone else’s design and development work.

Now, it would fill me with joy to post the URL and details of the offending website, and the details of the loosely called ‘web company’ who did the thievery here, however I can safely say that at this point my lawyers have asked me not to.

That’s right; I’m not shooting off a polite email to the offenders asking them to remove the offending website, that’s too easy. Doing that will no doubt cause some embarrassment and an argument between the client and so-called designers, but it’s not really what these folk deserve.

More details soon – they’ll be aware that we know what they’ve done within the next few weeks, and that’ll make for an interesting post.

Image: Factory in Midland.

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