My website design has been stolen!
Hmm, that looks familiar
It is commonly said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But is it? Well, if you have slaved over a website or graphic design over many hours/days/weeks and someone comes meandering along and helps them self to the fruits of your labour, would you be slightly perturbed?
Let’s rewind a couple of weeks to the arrival of an email in my inbox that suddenly caught my attention. Titled ‘website ripoff’, the sender (who prefers to remain anonymous) brought to my attention that our website design for our own company, Root Creative, had been copied (or stolen!) by a domain name reseller in Slovenia. No amount of prior warning could prepare me for what I was to see – a near pixel by pixel copy of our site, even to the point of using our ‘tree’ identity!! No effort had been even been made to make subliminal changes ie. to the colour scheme or the fonts.
Anyway, I don’t want to create an anti-climax, check it out for yourself…
I wasn’t too sure about the new nav bar that had been rattled up though. I think perhaps, that the sticky-fingered individual who ‘created’ it might think that it’s his ‘Get Out of Jail FREE’ card. I mean, it’s not REALLY an exact copy of our site, is it?!
So, how DO you stop someone nicking your designs? After all, there’s not that much that can be done if someone REALLY wants to copy your design. If they can’t get their hands on your code or images, they will simply re-create it.
Here’s a couple of helpful links that would assist you in protecting your images or code from being stolen, sorry, imaginatively recreated. But at least it’ll make it more difficult for others to claim as their own.
Watermark your portfolio images
It may look ugly at times, but at least it will stop someone from stealing your images and claiming as their own. Think iStockphoto images. See Tutorial
Copyscape
Copyscape is used by many websites to protect their content, it’s quite an effective way to be alerted whenever your website’s content is stolen. Copyscape website
Or, you could always send said person/company a polite email asking asking them to consider your intellectual copyright and that the site be altered to maintain karma amongst designers!
After mulling it over for a while, we at Root Creative, decided that our experience would be a great first blog post. Please feel free to post you own comments and if you have experienced something similar, we would love to know about it. At least we could gently remind you that imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery!!
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I feel for you and your team. Hardwork over days/weeks/months and someone just come along and rip you off. It is happening over and over again not only in UK but also in my country as well. They know that there’s pretty much you can’t do about it. The recover cost through legal means just stack up so heavily that we nice people just give up along the way.
I like this site very much.
This is such a outstanding web.
And it is not like other money orientated site, the content here is really helpful.
I am definitely bookmarking it as well as sharin it with my friends.
I prefer the other one…….
Only kidding, I think it is a disgrace that things like this happen in this day and age.
If it was me, I would get the lawyers involved, but you’s are nice guys, and I think it is commendable that you are not taking it any further.
Site is excellent guys, good luck in your new premises.
I just find out that my design has been ripped off after I sent the client to be a mock up. it’s quite but upsetting. Here you can see what i mean: http://bespokegrafiks.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-designs-got-stolen.html
Truly disgusting that people have the ignorance and sheer unoriginality to ripoff your site pixel for pixel, how do these people sleep at night?