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Plagiarism Today

A site about content theft, plagiarism and copyright infringement issues on the Web.
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Web Design Plagiarism

Started by Jonathan Bailey · 10 months ago

To Web developers, code is poetry and design is art. They spend countless hours hammering out attractive, functional and effective designs. They edit images, layout pages, write code and produce body copy with the same skill and craftsmanship as many artists, authors and musicians do.
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4 comments

  • Matthijs

    2 years ago

    Great article again Jonathan.

    One advice for anyone looking for "inspiration": even if you don't commit copyright infringement by writing all code yourself and designing all images yourself, be careful. If a design is too similar or looks a bit familiar, sooner or later people will find out and publicly nail you. And that's not a pleasant experience, to say the least. Certainly if you didn't mean to rip someone off and you really did your best to design something original.
    reply
  • Jackie

    2 years ago

    Great article.
    I, unfortunately, got to experience all of this first hand not to long ago and with a very stubborn "thief". We finally succeed in getting him to change the index page and even though just about every page is almost exact my client eventually got tired of the fight and let things go.
    Your article would have been a great resource at the time and I'll be sure to bookmark it for the future.
    reply
  • designer

    9 months ago

    I have a question: I designed websites for a company that later went down. My project manager had access to all of the PSDs that I designed. He later started his own business and listed tons of my designs as sites his company has designed. Legally I don't think I have rights to them (since I designed them for the orginal company that went out of business), but neither does he. Can anything be done? I can see listing sites you designed for another company in your personal portfolio, but starting a company with mockups of someone elses work is soo wrong. Can I do anything?
    reply
  • Jonathan Bailey

    9 months ago

    The question here is were you an independent contractor or an actual employee? If you were a contractor, you still have copyright in those works and you would be able to file DMCA notices and take other action as such designs If you were an employee, it is considered a work for hire and the company that went out of business owns those rights. They likely sold their copyrights when they went under as part of liquidation so the trick would be to find who holds those rights and write them.

    Hope that helps!
    reply

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