Web design: stolen property?

Posted on April 14, 2007 by Dave J.

There aren’t many industrial folks blogging about their business. That’s why I happily subscribed to QC Industries’ blog. Mostly show news, new products, etc. It was quite a surprise to find a post titled: They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery with this interesting news:

“Don’t get me wrong, we’re flattered that someone liked our website enough to copy it. But this site isn’t a template we bought somewhere and repurposed for our needs; it was built from the ground up by our internal web design/development team. We spent countless hours and cups of coffee to build a custom site that met the unique needs of QC Industries and its customers.”

Yep, their website design got ripped. And Chris Thompson from QC was bold enough to complain about it publicly. There are a number of comments that come from web designers (or college students) who don’t think anything horrible happened, basically saying that there is nothing truly unique about the website.

Go take a look. What do you think? What would you do?

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  • Hans

    This article is missing the point to some extent. There are fantastic web solutions available as open source, making it hard to make a claim on a content management system. But while the CMS is open source, installing it and tweaking it to an application still takes time, and this time needs to be covered somehow.The look & feel of a website (theme) remains an issue though. While CMS such as drupal or wordpress offer a wide variety of themes, it remains hard to find a suitable one, and this is a problem for many web developers. And since a theme represents an organisation’s house-style, and belongs to its branded market presence, it should not be in the public domain if the organisation does not want it to be.The legal issues surrounding this can be daunting, but in practice, being polite, and asking permission, even when sites have a Creative Commons licencing policy avoids most of the problems.

  • Hans

    This article is missing the point to some extent. There are fantastic web solutions available as open source, making it hard to make a claim on a content management system. But while the CMS is open source, installing it and tweaking it to an application still takes time, and this time needs to be covered somehow.The look & feel of a website (theme) remains an issue though. While CMS such as drupal or wordpress offer a wide variety of themes, it remains hard to find a suitable one, and this is a problem for many web developers. And since a theme represents an organisation’s house-style, and belongs to its branded market presence, it should not be in the public domain if the organisation does not want it to be.The legal issues surrounding this can be daunting, but in practice, being polite, and asking permission, even when sites have a Creative Commons licencing policy avoids most of the problems.

  • Adam

    It’s important not to get too enamored with your own creations. There are not too many unique or completely original ideas, especially in our industry. :) We’ve had our sites content used to varying degrees, from complete cut paste of the design and copy, to “borrowing” part of text. Even though it is flattering that people think highly enough of the material to take it as their own, it’s still frustrating. Usually, the best approach is to keep level headed and look at each circumstance and evaluate how to respond. In one case, we had our lawyers send a cease and desist letter, but other times we’ve had good success contacting site owners directly and talking through the issues. I don’t see this issue diminishing in the future. At least search engines are starting to take notice and not indexing copied sites!

  • Adam

    It’s important not to get too enamored with your own creations. There are not too many unique or completely original ideas, especially in our industry. :) We’ve had our sites content used to varying degrees, from complete cut paste of the design and copy, to “borrowing” part of text. Even though it is flattering that people think highly enough of the material to take it as their own, it’s still frustrating. Usually, the best approach is to keep level headed and look at each circumstance and evaluate how to respond. In one case, we had our lawyers send a cease and desist letter, but other times we’ve had good success contacting site owners directly and talking through the issues. I don’t see this issue diminishing in the future. At least search engines are starting to take notice and not indexing copied sites!