Stealing Trend
June 21st, 2007 Filed in: News & Updates Jump to commentsSo, what is the next web trend after the Web 2.0 trend? Steal. I’ve been noticing this trend for a while and in fact it is rising. Rippers now on the Internet steal anything from text content, graphics, icons, design templates, to coding scripts. Almost every other week, I get an email from visitors telling me who stole my work. By the way, thanks for reporting copyright violations to me. This becoming an issue and I really want to bring it up. I have setup a Flickr gallery to showcase the ripped work. Here are some of the sample cases.
TV Print Ads (new)
Two days after I published this post, someone sent me another email reported my work being stolen by two Bosnia & Herzegovina TV stations - OBN.ba and RTRS.tv. He was nice enough scanned the newspaper ads and sent it to me. Although, I’ve never seen the actual ads but I believe they just ripped my high resolution wallpapers (without any editing). This is ridiculous, from a TV station?
SWsoft Sitebuilder
SWsoft Sitebuilder is an online application that allows users quickly build their website without any programming or design experience. The hosting provider will install the Sitebuilder on their server. Their clients will use the online wizard to pick a template, fill in the content, and then upload to their web space. I found several of my artworks were included in the application as a template. I certainly did not give them permission nor sold my work to them. It was actually a media/hosting company who reported this to me.
Canvas Printouts
Believe me or not, I found these in a local shopping mall, Pacific Mall. If you live in Toronto area, you probably have been to the mall or know about it. It is located at Kennedy and Steele. I was shopping at the mall and found my works were selling at a retail booth. They printed my work on a large size canvas and selling for $35CAD. I quickly took some pictures with my camera phone and asked the owner where did they get the products from. The owner told me they brought their products through several level of connections, thus unable to trace the manufacture.
Best Web Gallery being ripped
Shortly after I launched Best Web Gallery, I found a site just ripped it exactly the same, but replaced with a different logo. They even copied my gallery entries and screenshots. As usual, I sent them an email and asked them to remove the design and related content. However, I didn’t receive any response. So, I submitted to Digg and got more attention. Then, the site quickly removed the theme in the next day.
How did I catch them?
Well, the Internet is very small. Unless you don’t publish your site online, otherwise the chance of you getting spotted is very high. Most of them are reported from visitors. The others are traced from referral links and tracking codes.
What should you do if someone stole your work?
I’m sure I’m not the only victim. What would you do if someone stole your work?
Send them an email? Half of the time, they don’t even have a contact number or email address on their site. If you are lucky enough, they will apologize and remove your work. The worst I’ve seen they just ignore your emails and pretend nothing happened. Or even worst they will claim as original and question you back “are you sure you are the original creator?”
Find a lawyer and sue them? It is probably not worth the value to sue them because most of them are small business or personal website. The lawyer fee will probably cost you more.
How do you handle your copyright infringement issues? Any advises or suggestions that you can share with us?
July 2nd, 2007 at 12:28 am
You can get most people to remove offending content just by contacting them directly. For others, you can hire an attorney off of a freelance site like Elance to send a letter for less than $100.
A lot of lawyers and legal types hang out on Elance to pick up random work, and are willing to send infringement letters. You can use a registrar’s whois to locate the site owner’s address, or if it’s private, you can send a personal letter to the email listed on the whois (generally an abuse email for the registrar). Explain the situation and the steps you will take if they are unwilling to give you the information (mentioning a lawyer will pretty much guarantee that they will either give you the contact info or contact the site owner directly).
Stealing designs is becoming an epidemic, and believe it or not, a lot of the offenders are actually designers. As a designer myself, it drives me nuts when I get requests for cloned sites and stuff like that — but it happens all the time.
July 1st, 2007 at 10:09 pm
Well there are a few things you can do - to protect your images I am sure there are file protection programs out there. Print work is a little trickier. As for just styles, changing the name to something random of the directory of your style.css file works. You could always get a lawyer and copyright all your work.
July 1st, 2007 at 7:33 pm
Wow that must really suck..it’s actually kind of sad to see these people ripping your work.
July 1st, 2007 at 3:28 pm
OMG, be proud! The one selling your work on canvas was the icing on the cake!
July 1st, 2007 at 4:44 am
Welcome to the internet friends…
June 30th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
It sucks that there are people who just leech your work! I wonder if there’s a better way to protect one’s work and creativity. The internet is great source for getting your work out there, but the problem is people just taking your work and not crediting you…. :( Thank you for letting us know about things like this. I guess as you grow a larger site you have to think about how to protect your work…
June 30th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
I’m guessing, the TV stations that downloaded your stuff, didn’t read the terms of use, or probably didn’t understand it, and made use of the images thinking its totally free.
June 30th, 2007 at 8:15 am
That TV station can now have big trubble. But i think you say that those wallpapers can anyone take?
June 29th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
well i’ll admit that i wouldn’t call it a TOTAL steal. I mean, he probably used the glossy theme as a base, but he deeply edited it and worked really much on it and it now looks quite different from the original one!
It’s almost like starting from the basic wordpress theme you know. I mean he could have wrote that he used glossy theme as a base, but there’s a lot of people who do worth!! ;)
June 29th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
hey nick,
sorry to say but ive found some else who has used your glossy theme, changed it and has not credit you back on it.
The site is :http://www.cgitop.com/