What to do when your design is stolen?
Tom from Delete London recently dropped me a line about their website design being stolen by… Jane Fonda (well… actually by the people who created her website). Although this is not the worst case of design theft, it looks like Jane Fonda’s designers have been more than just “inspired”. Even though imitation can be taken as a form of flattery for a designer, let’s take a look at what you can do to when it happens to you.
Common cases of design theft
- Stolen webdesigns
This is the case in the above image, there is countless examples of this, like here or here. Hard to understand why people would steal a website’s design when there is great free open-source templates or free WordPress themes. - Copied ideas and designs
This happens all the time, people will crawl some inspirational websites like LogoPond or Logospire and use it for their client work. Some go as far as reselling it on stock websites. In both cases, the client or buyer has no clue that the logo he got is a rip-off. This type of theft is probably the most common and the hardest to protect yourself from. - Stock material freely distributed
Selling stock can be an interesting source of income for a designer, and if you invested time to create high-quality vectors or Photoshop brushes it can be quite annoying to see it freely distributed on Torrent sites. Go Media had to deal with that issue. - Website content theft
Even though RSS is a great technology that allows people to follow your blog’s update without coming back to your site all the time, it has also made website content theft a easier than ever. It happened recently to Spoonfed design. Some people even create scraped websites with a stolen design and sell it on forums or marketplaces.
Preventive measures
The first action you can take is to protect your designs as much as you can. Even thought most of these techniques are not satisfactory, here is a few steps you can take:
- Add watermarks to your images
Although this can be quite effective to discourage people from stealing images on your website, it will add some noise to the image and make your portfolio less attractive. Personally I wouldn’t use it but it had to be mentionned. Learn how to batch watermark adding in Photoshop. - Digital watermaks
A hidden, invisible digital watermark. The thief will not know that it’s there but you can prove the image is yours. Read an introduction to digital watermarks here. - Copyscape
Copyscape is used by many websites to protect their content, it’s quite effective way to be alerted whenever your website’s content is stolen. - Put the copyright info on your website
Sound like dumb advice huh? However many people surfing the web have no clue that content and images can be copyrighted. - Use TinyEye image search
An image recognition search engine, find potential copies of your images.
When your design is stolen
The first question you should really ask yourself in case of design theft: is it worth using my time to react?
- Contact the thief
Unfortunatly many people aren’t aware that they are infringing copyright when taking your design, so no need to be agressive in your first email. Just inform your thief what he did wrong, why it is wrong and politely ask him to change his design or remove the stolen content. - Contact the thief again
If you didn’t get a reply to your first email, you can contact your thief again and explain him/her what you will do next if there is no reaction from them. - Contact his webhost
When people really won’t reply, then you can try to take them down from their webhost. Usually hosting providers will cooperate if they see that your design or content has obviously been stolen. Of course if the design is on a stock site, it’s that site that you should contact. - Get community support
Many websites will collect stolen design and put a little shame on the thief, signal your stolen design there (for example this Flickr group or Joe La Pompe). - Take legal action
I never did it so I don’t have experience to share on this, but if your case is serious enough and really hurting you, think about getting a lawyer and attacking your thief more seriously.
Have you ever been ripped off?
Did this ever happen to you? What did you do in such a case? Please share any other idea on how to react in the comments.
What is remarkable (but not surprising) is that the copied websites never improve on the original – they are mediocre half-efforts at best. I love Delete London’s style, but Fonda’s site manages to mangle its harmony. If you’re going to copy a website (shame!), I’d at least take care to maintain the same quality standard…
Very useful information.
I haven’t looked into the coding or css side of the site but c’mon!
What’s so stolen here?
Boxes with rounded corners and drop shadows?
960px page width?
White background with light text?
Big teasers?
The Fonda apparently site isn’t very well thougt but accusing the guys who built it of copy theft appears slightly sissy to me.
What people have done with Tim van Damme’s site (http://timvandamme.com/) that’s stolen design. But using some common design principles clearly is not.
Now please stop crying…
Okay.. am I the only one that saw that they credited Delete in Fonda’s footer?
© 2009 Jane Fonda | Profile Photo by Andrew Eccles | Based on a Design by Delete | Privacy | Contact
I’ve had this happen in both my freelancing and in my 9 to 5. In the freelancing incident, I had a music site that me and a classmate created and ran. Several of my classmates knew about the site, but once we graduated, one of them took the liberty of some of my design and content. I contacted him and he removed it.
In the 9 to 5, I created a wireless eccommerce site for the company and I believe it was one of the companies buyer decide to life the look and feel and us it for his/her personal wireless site.
It sucks that someone would steal you creative work and try to pass it off as their own, but its also flattering.
You should have looked into the code then, the design has clearly been taken from Delete London. It may not be the most obvious design rip-off, but I wrote this post because of Tom’s email, that’s why I’m keeping their example.
I’m with Karl. The Delete site is very, very similar to lots of other sites. It would be tough to steal from something that generic.
There is some credits in the footer because I’ve been so slow to write this post and it seems that Delete London already found an agreement with Jane Fonda’s website’s maintainers.
I find the two websites below are very similar, it’s like they got inspired from each other!
http://www.urbanoutfitters.com/urban/index.jsp
& http://www.forever21.com/heritage1981/main.asp
From a few comments I can see where there would be a problem proving that content was stolen and not just used as inspiration. It can be a very fine line sometimes.
Well, yes my website http://cucweb.org was stolen not once but twice, by two different groups. I wrote to both the parties to which http://www.vivvo.cz politely took their website offline, while the other site http://opturkey.com is still acting very stubborn and has not replied to my third notification warning.
This is getting really nasty now …
I don’t think this would hold up in court. There are obvious similarities and it is very obviously inspired by the other site, but there are also enough differences that I don’t think this would hold up at all.
Just to make things clear, I’m not suggesting that Delete should go to court in that case, I’m just talking about what you could do if design theft happened to you.
even the background image is EXACTLY the same on the opturkey.com site as yours. they didn’t even decide they wanted an effect like that and create a similar image, they stole the bg image directly from your site. if you own the copyright for that image it will be very easy to prove that they ripped off your site design and images. good luck with your case.
Karl,
It is closed-minded of you to be ignorant of what Jane Fonda’s designers did here – if you view the original post on Delete London (http://www.deletelondon.com/culture/did-jane-fonda-steal-my-website- ) you can see a mini-gallery where they compare her design to theirs. Her design team has changed some elements since they clearly noticed that Delete had caught them red handed.
The things you listed are correctly not patented by Delete, but the fact that a) the article headings were the exact same b) same CSS styles c) same custom background d) exact same layout/look e) the fact that some of Delete’s files (like their logo) were found on Jane Fonda’s site folder hidden away.
Clearly a rip, and a damn shame at that.
A while ago, I was reading something on techcrunch about someone’s blog posts being stolen. It ended up leading me to site named Plagiarism Today which has excellent articles and other resources for fighting plagiarism. Thought it might be helpful…
–Matt
These are ripped off sites: http://www.flickr.com/photos/piratedsites/
Unfortunately the piratedsites web site has been tagged as malicious by Google.
Karl and Ann +1
Great article! Thanks for recommending Copyscape. I got one of my articles lifted from my site recently and i contacted the site owner multiple times and he still didn’t pull it off..):
This is an increasingly important issue of the worth of Intellectual Property.
The answer (as so often) ‘it all depends’ ..on the type of creative business you are in.
Recent business models encourage ‘theft’ or anyway encourage rapid give aways. If so, the ‘trick’ has to turn theft into viral marketing gains.
Good luck creatives everywhere.
You talk about theft that happened to Spoonfed Design, without even mentioning that Spoonfed Design’s header design is basically a poorly executed copy of Web Designer’s Depot – they even use the same iMac icon.
Well, this is a free iMac icon and they both used it, does it really make the whole header a copy?
You forgot one very important point if you decide to go to the mat. DOCUMENT EVERYTHING. Date/time stamps that indic your authorship will go a LONG way to protecting yourself or obtaining a settlement. Make sure you weigh the potential ROI of litigation. Little fish won’t be worth your time. In their case, a “cease and desist” letter may be the best remedy.
At first blush, it doesn’t look like much of a rip at all (I’m with Karl … I’d not have even glanced twice), but clearly, the evidence says otherwise. (As you say, not the best or most obvious rip-off, but an interesting topic).
My question: How did Delete find the Fonda site?
Thanks for posting the resources, there’s a few there that I’ll have to look into.
Mostly, it’s images that are ripped from our site (tho never hot-linked). I’ve not run across any rips of our commercial work and I’m not certain how I’d feel, if I did. I suppose it depends on the size of the organization doing the ripping (i.e., the larger, more established the organization, the more I’d be likely to see remediation).
I had this happen to me. Took my entire site and then just translated the whole thing to Spanish and put it up as their own. Great points in your post. Any further suggestions in regards to legal action if you are dealing with someone in another country? In my case, I did not have to go that far the web host took the site down. Not sure what could have been done legally since it was out of the country.
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I think most of those “theft” is generated by this inspiration-collections. Even if those galleries are a great source of inspiration, some people won’t still use their brain to think about an own unique design. Even design patterns are dangerous…
I think many designs are inspired by others rather than out right theft. That said if the graphic file names remain unchanged that is a tell tale sign of theft.
I used to work for a large underwear company and created a piece of functionality on a department page that increased the click through rate by 400% it was so successful that we deployed it across all the department pages and the home page. Another well known lingerie site spotted this and copied it. I was more flattered than anything though and they did at least change the visual design substantially.
Inspiration isn’t always the easiest thing to find in this day and age. I believe that art and the world that surrounds it has become so fast paced that it’s harmful to itself.
Art, design, music even are at a point now where people both individual and companies feel they have to constantly pump out product one after the other in order to keep up with a false sense of demand. I think they do this to keep themselves in the lime light in some sense. A decade ago people made a point of taking the time, not releasing a piece of work until they were positive that it was finished, sure it was at it’s best. Artists felt it was right to take the time to find inspiration in life and in themselves in order to create something.. not just inspiration in a like minded project.
Too many people trying to grasp at the title, too many people trying to be noticed. Not enough true artists creating beauty for the sake of creating something beautiful.
just my 2 cents.
must read info for all web geeks
Great advice to follow. Thanks.
I don’t mean to be picky, but the website’s name is tineye, not tinyeye.
If you think that’s bad check out this guy who stole our design, it was literally a pixel for pixel copy!
http://www.rootcreative.co.uk/blog/my-website-design-has-been-stolen/
From a few comments I can see where there would be a problem proving that content was stolen and not just used as inspiration.
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
@Daniel_Contogiannis
Right on!!! Finally, an individual who is not one of the zombified majority! I agree with you 100%; please stay UNplugged and maintain your admirable -and refreshing- independence and integrity!
I’ve actually just had this happen to me from another shooter from Brazil.
It’s flattering that someone like my site enough, but I paid to have it designed from the ground up and having someone benefit from months of hard work from my designer is very frustrating. Being an international dispute I don’t know how much leverage I have , but I have to say something. As a creative I can’t just stand there while someone does that.
This was very helpful. I will stop back in and let you know how it goes.
Cheers!
Dan