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?
June 24th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
Hey nick,
I feel terrible that someone is stealing your work. I live in the toronto area (just out of oshawa) and I go to durham college for webdesign / development. I would be disgusted if anyone stole my work and claimed it as their own or didnt even give me credit.
I can only suggest that you take legal action against the store you saw in Pacific Mall since they are actually making money of of your work.
I know legal costs are expensive but if you can go to small claims court or something and get a settlement it might help you out a bit.
I know there are ways to protect images with javascript aplications not allowing right clicking and such… and I hope you look into things like that and other options in the future to try and cut down on mis-use of your work.
Contact me if you ever need a programmer / designer, or heck just want to chat (im in the area).
~Good luck!
June 24th, 2007 at 11:06 am
tutorial writers
es una web que no deja usar el click derecho ni seleccionar texto
esa es la solucion
suscribite ahi
y tu pagina
tendra desabilitada en la navegacion la opciones de copiado
June 24th, 2007 at 10:04 am
with your lawyer issue. not only will it cost you money BUT when you won (because this case would be a sinch) you would get a lot of money out of it. you have terms of use on here which state clearly that you can not sell your work. and look i see it right now. copyright mark, your name and year. i think youd have a solid case. id say think about it for sure and get a quote from a lawyer that specializes in copyright infringment.
ps. i also love your work and have one of your icons as my display pic and ive spread the word about you :)
June 24th, 2007 at 10:02 am
They are stealing of you because you’re a good designer. They are too poor and too lazy to make something by her own.
June 24th, 2007 at 6:37 am
Hey nick,
Im a big fan of yours and i support you all the way through this! I recently found myself in a bit of a scandal through the popular website deviantART. As someone had both posted some of my artwork and published it on his blog. But i was not the only victim, he had stolen many of others works to. As a colabaritive we approached the owner of the profile but we received no feedback from him. Before this we had reported him to deviantART, but a week later we noticed that he had added more stolen images to his profile. So we got a team together to report this offence and within 8 hours he had been banned.
Now i know that this is isnt relevant to your situration and any ideas we might have, but here are mine:
Use WhoIS to contact the server and tell them about this wrong doing if you get no email back.
Confront the person saying this is your art, with no reply get a few people to email him. This takes a bigger impact.
Just my opinion,
Mc Cool
June 24th, 2007 at 2:49 am
You said “The lawyer fee will probably cost you more.”
But if you won , they must pay all your spending.
June 23rd, 2007 at 7:34 pm
I really feel sad for you and others. What I do, is that I file a lawsuit and then see their face in trouble. It doen’t matter on how much you spend, all it matter is to get thief to their feet. I am think about sending ideas to the US Congrees to make Copyright Laws more effective and powerful. I had someone steal my C&C Generals Mod’s whole storyline.
June 23rd, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Nick, there are so many thieves in this world. and believe me, we can nothing to do, if the thieves do not solve the problem in itself. It sadly made me if someone steals your work. We’re Behind You All The Way!
June 23rd, 2007 at 11:52 am
Nick - this is horrible!!! there has got to be something you can do!!! I know that almost every state has a non-profit organization called the Lawyers For the Arts (or sometimes the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts). Make a search in google, and find the one for your state. It’s a way less expensive alternative then going out and getting a personal attorney (if you don’t already have one) plus they are Arts attorney’s, so I’m sure some, if not all of them have dealt with this type of situation before.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if it was just little crappy sites here and there that don’t get much traffic anyway, but the fact that someone is making serious dollars off your work - I think you need to put the smack down on some fools!
Good luck to you, and I hope it all gets squared away!!
June 23rd, 2007 at 5:56 am
I used to have a website that used to have content stolen quite regularly. I laid JavaScript “traps” that would pass the url to a script on my site, which emails me the url of the guilty site. I then emailed the host to take it down and it worked most of the time.
When some fools copied the HTML, they also copied my Amazon referral links, so even though I shut the site down after 3 years I’m still getting sales commission creeping through!