Imitation : Flattery :: Thievery : ?

Discovering a thief

We keep a pretty close eye on our website analytics. Currently we’re getting a fair amount of international traffic (from gallery sites and the code for our header arrow, which Troy released under an open license) and it’s fun to watch the map filling in with visits from all over the world.

Yesterday, when checking our most popular pages for the day, I noticed a website address outside of our domain. After clicking the link, this loads:

(Header blurred to protect the client, as they probably had no idea they were getting stolen work.)

So, obviously that’s our website—only someone switched out an image and replaced the footer with: ©2008 Company info@company.com | Web-design by: baglov.

The title of the page hadn’t even been changed, and he commented out (not deleted) our contact information and home page content.

Why steal it? The menu is free.

Here’s the thing: we released the code for the menu on the blog. We have no problem with people creating their own website designs using the JavaScript code we created with MooTools. Of course, that doesn’t mean copying every image from our website, one by one, and then calling it your own design. The idea is that a person would create their own design elements and use the code we released to animate a menu hover effect.

Anyway, everyone here was a little surprised. To steal our design and not even be clever enough to remove the tracking codes? So we sent out an email to him, his hosting company and the company he was designing the website for. We were hoping that when we woke up this morning, the website would be deleted and that would be the end of it.

Unfortunately, the website was still up. Okay then.

We contacted his hosting firm via Skype. At first, they didn’t want to do anything about it. We had noticed that Baglov places their hosting banner on every site he makes, and they told us what a nice guy he was, so they probably do business together often. That being said, they were pretty reasonable. They blocked access to the offending sub-directory until the matter could be settled, but wouldn’t remove the content from their server without speaking to Baglov first. We needed to resolve the issue directly with him.

So after digging a little deeper, we found Baglov’s main web design portfolio. With the assistance of Google Language Tools, we found his Skype user name and a phone number. Score. We called him via Skype. He didn’t pick up. We sent him an instant message.

Chatting with the design thief

Surprisingly, he responds! We point him to our website and the offending website, and ask a very simple question: “wtf?”

First, he claims he found the menu on an open source site. He probably did—Troy’s code was posted to a couple of blogs. Of course, posting code for others to repurpose isn’t the same as ripping off our entire website.

When we explain this to him, he claims he found it as a template. We ask him where he downloaded the template. He doesn’t know.

(If the website had been posted, analytics trackers and all, to a template download site, we would have seen other domains show up in the data. There were none.)

We ask him to delete the site, and he agrees to.

[12:45:21 PM] C????? [IT] says: I deleted a template

[12:45:56 PM] consider: open says: Just as long as it is deleted, we have no problem.

[12:47:38 PM] C????? [IT] says: You can check I deleted a template. And it is not necessary to think that everybody wants to steal.

[12:48:30 PM] consider: open says: You downloaded my images one by one, changed one thing, took all my html and css… that IS stealing

[12:48:39 PM] consider: open says: but as long as its gone, doesn’t matter

[12:50:25 PM] C????? [IT] says: Sory… I am not guilty that your templates are laid out in zip archives

[12:51:31 PM] consider: open says: If that were true, we’d be seeing the analytics tracker elsewhere. And since you can’t tell us where you downloaded it, that is meaningless.

[12:52:54 PM] consider: open says: And why would you claim “web design by baglov” if it was a template?

[12:53:01 PM] consider: open says: That’s still dishonest

[12:54:11 PM] C????? [IT] says: I talk that it is the first sketch of future site only.

[12:54:52 PM] C????? [IT] says: It can be still changed one hundred times

[12:55:24 PM] C????? [IT] says: I did not know that your site exists in general

Right… that template that he found but couldn’t provide a link to. And now, he’s claiming that he didn’t know that our site existed.

Maybe we could have believed that, despite the fact that the title and meta data still had our information inside it and that he’d commented out our contact information and home page copy.

Except… We had the tracking information for his IP, and he visited our site (14 page views) about an hour and a half before our home page showed up on his domain. He visited a couple more times within that hour, probably so that he could download all the images.

We pointed all of this out. He then blamed the Russian to English translator he was using, saying that he had visited the website. Whatever, that’s fine. The files have been deleted. That’s all we wanted.

Just as we’re signing off, he asks where we found his Skype address.

On the internets, of course!