This is nothing. Our 100k line vod web app was ripped off wholesale, with a new backend built from scratch, and repurposed to show pirate content. This was some serious engineering chops and time investment that went into a ripping off a site with hundreds upon hundreds of templates and thousands of lines of js and ajax interacting with an unknown backend that had to be reverse-engineered. We discovered it because they forgot to change the Google Analytics code (which they were polite enough to fix once we brought it to their attention via their facebook page) so we saw this huge traffic content ramp up from Georgia. There is no way to view it as anything but flattering.
We did not publicize it in any way because we are a legit film streaming company with hundreds of distributors worldwide, and no good can come from any awareness of a site that looks like ours streaming pirated content. Maybe some day.
I worked at a company where our web site was copied by a competitor entering the same domain. They copied the look of the site but also copied the Google Analytics tag as well. We found out about them because their page views showed up in our analytics.
Boy-oh-boy I wish Google would lock analytics IDs down to a domain. Somebody in a university in Mexico City copied mine into a project they have in their www directory, and I just had to regex filter it out of GA.
seems like the amount of people who do this is rather big. Google probably thinks it's a good way to track users of websites that aren't their customers :D
I had a similar experience. When they copied our website they even copied the corporate logo at the bottom of the page, which was linked back to our corporate website. I was looking at the referrer logs for the corporate site and saw click-throughs from some site I had never heard of.
At the company I work for now, they found a site for a British company (we are in the US) that didn't steal the look of the site or the copy of the site -- they stole the names, headshots and bios of the executives and used them on their site.
This exact same situation happened to me in the past month. My login page and its assets were copied, right down to the Rails asset digest fingerprints in the filenames as well as the Google Analytics code, which is how I discovered them.
I sent a sternly worded "Notice of Copyright Infringement" email and two weeks later their whole site was completely redesigned.
“Pablo Picasso said the famous words: "Good artists copy, great artists steal". But you shouldn't take that all too literally though. Inspiration is one thing - it happens all the time, especially in the design world. But there is a very obvious line between copying and inspiration.”
Actually, it was Steve Jobs who said that. Jobs attributed it to Picasso, but there’s no record of Picasso saying anything of the sort.
T.S. Eliot did write something like it:
“One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”
That quote was subsequently used in a biography of Picasso by John Richardson. That's probably how Jobs came to remember it as a quote by Picasso.
In conclusion, in 1892 an important precursor of this family of expressions was published. The author was W. H. Davenport Adams, and his words may have influenced the version that T. H. Eliot published in 1920.
When I was in high school, in an English class unit on journalism, I learned how the United Press caught a competing news organization (Hearst, as I recall) faking stories about the eastern front in World War I. The United Press reporters inserted details about a Russian government official named Nelotsky in their news stories, and watched the statements about Nelotsky get copied into reports from the competing wire service. There was just one problem with Hearst's journalistic procedure: there wasn't any such Russian official. The name "Nelotsky" came from reversing the spelling of the English word "stolen" and adding a Russian-looking "ky" ending.
Similarly, in the 1990s I noticed that a popular page on my personal website was being copied diligently by a college student for his personal website. I inserted a fake entry, based on the Greek word for "steal." I also put a link at that entry leading to the copyright notice page on my personal website, which has a distinctive filename unique to my site. When the student copied the page again, I was able to show the site administrator of his site that the student had plainly violated the site user agreement at that academic institution, which specifically required students not to plagiarize for their postings on the university site.
I didn't do a lot of public outing of that student--but you had better believe I still remember who he was. Teachers do well to teach students early and often to use their own noggins and to do their own writing, giving proper credit with correct citation form to sources they rely on. That's a better education than just letting students copy whatever they happen to see, without any analysis or thought at all.
That's a great story about Nelotsky, I hadn't heard that before.
For those interested, these fake entries to catch copyright infringement are commonly referred to as "Mountweazels". They are common in maps (fake towns, roads) and dictionaries (fake words and definitions). You can read more on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
Like heyitsnick said, that sounds like trap streets and Esquivalience. The thing I always wondered is if these fictitious items weren't actually hurtful to the reputation of the company creating them.
am I the only one who doesnt find the sites that similar after all? Or to put it another way - neither of them seem particularly unique (fixed header, slider on top, broad sections and large footer) compared to many marketing sites these days?
Nope, I'm with you. I've seen much more obvious plagiarisms. Although it's obvious that Kintek were more than a little inspired by infinum, and indeed some items look copied as is except the color change, the rest looks like any other bootstrap / grid based marketing site template. They might have pushed the "inspiration" part to the limit, and might deserve the post for not being too original, but I'm sure you can find thousands of sites that have similar elements and statistically, some of them copied from someone else. And I'm sure infinium were also inspired (even subconsciously) from other designers.
Almost every other site today has a dark header, a Mac screen / laptop carousel, slide scroll / parallax / infinite scrolling and a 3 column grid using the same icon fonts, dark 3 column footer with links, partners / as seen on techcrunch / customer logos in gray emboss. everyone has it. Although it's clear they copied, you could find sites that have these elements that didn't copy (or copied from someone else). So it's just the number of similar elements that is annoying, not each element individually IMHO.
Styles, like fashion, follow trends. But the similarities on these sites go well beyond just similar trends, especially once you're beyond the main page. The copy on the "Services" page is probably the most damning:
We provide a wide array of software design and development
services -- from Mobile applications and Web applications
to User interface design, Quality assurance and Digital
Strategy -- we're a trusted partner helping you develop
your business.
vs
We provide a wide array of Award Winning design and
development services -- from Digital Strategy, QA and UX
Design to iOS, Android, and Facebook Apps, Responsive
Mobile Enhanced Websites, Ecommerce and Business
Automation Tools -- we're your trusted partner in Digital.
I don't think anyone honestly believes those sentences were written independently of each other. Look at them in their context on the page, and the plausibility of coincidental design similarity goes even further out the window. This was clearly a copy/paste/edit job.
That's not good enough; it's too common. Sentence structure can't be copyrighted, just as common design elements can't be copyrighted. Show us HTML or CSS blocks that are exactly the same or slightly tweaked on both websites.
It's not "damning" because that sentence structure, in particular, can't be copyrighted. It's "damning" because it is one very obvious part of a larger whole which, compounded, make it very unlikely that these two sites were developed independently. You could argue that Kintek changed it just enough to make it not plagiarism or copyright violation, but that's not exactly the point.
- The scrolling animations on the header are exactly the same.
- The curved/depressed backgrounds behind the hero image (fairly unique) are the same shape and style.
- Page sizing is the same.
- Color scheme is the same, with blue swapped out for red.
These are just from glancing quickly between the two sites. Combined with the overall similarity, the fact that the scrolling animation is exactly the same is the most damning evidence that they deliberately copied the other site.
Your sentence is made up of letters and symbols that are used in hundreds (thousands, millions) of books and writings around the world. How dare you copy them. Come up with your own alphabet.
(My point: It's not the individual elements that matter. It's the unique combination. Infinum may not be exactly trend-setting, but unless you can find a site constructed with the exact same combination of design details, I say that Infinum is nowhere near as guilty when it comes to copying.)
Where Infinum uses #333, Kintek uses #313131. Where Infinum uses rgb(34, 34, 34), Kintek converts it to hex and uses #222222. The only major difference I can find is the highlight color, which is obvious. (red vs. blue)
You're not alone. In fact, at first I thought their sites were standard Wordpress templates. I was kind of surprised they actually built them by hand. They both consist solely of what I would consider standard elements and layouts.
It's one of the most blatant examples of plagiarism I've ever seen.
It's arguably worse than simple wholesale lifting of css, since they've carefully and deliberately redrawn distinctive design elements, and lifted half the copy as well
And this is a medium-sized design company, in a developed country. And it got nominated for an award.
Sure, the design has evolved a bit since it started as a direct copy, and the design wasn't that original in the first place, but I'm baffled by people suggesting the similarities might have been accidental.
Um, did you know that "awards" in the software industry are a sort of marketing gray area where companies pay a lot for a submission to some "organization" who then hands out "awards" and "nomiations" that can be advertized on websites?
"Awards" in many industries are marketing grey areas. In this case, though, it's just yet another free css design gallery: the only notable thing being that kintek probably nominated themselves, knowing exactly where their original design came from...
> I put out a new product a couple of weeks ago. This new product has so far won 16 different awards and recommendations from software download sites. Some of them even emailed me messages of encouragement such as “Great job, we’re really impressed!”. I should be delighted at this recognition of the quality of my software, except that the ‘software’ doesn’t even run. This is hardly surprising when you consider that it is just a text file with the words “this program does nothing at all” repeated a few times and then renamed as an .exe. The PAD file that described the software contains the description “This program does nothing at all”.
That's pretty much the feeling I had... I would even say that it might be that kintek never heard of this guys, they just happened to have very similar idea that probably came from similar sources.
Looking at the code, it looks like the Infinum site is using a bootstrap base, but a fairly customized navbar, and that the kintek site is using something else... the structure of the markup is similar, but definitely different, as well as the difference in CSS classes.
Yes, there are similarities, but I have no reason to believe that one is a ripoff of another. They're both pretty bog-standard bootstrap-like marketing sites.
It may not seem like it is copied, but it definitely is. Take a look at the background image that gives that curved effect. They haven't just tried to recreate it, they've literally downloaded the same image and just used that.
If you hash both files on the original website and the new one, you'll see they both amount to: e6a486ac74a59aaa1abefec33de40c55
while it certainly looks like the second one did indeed rip off the first, i'd have to say there's nothing at all about the first one that looks even remotely interesting or innovative to me. looks like a run-of-the-mill $20 wordpress template.
Bootstrap provides a slim set of tools for constructing a website. The power comes in it's components, mobile-readiness, and extensibility. Going from default Bootstrap to either of these two sites would still take a lot of design work. You can also see the linked article's author talking about specific design decisions they made that aren't made by default Bootstrap.
I think a more accurate critique would be to look at some of the templates on Wrap Bootstrap. A lot of them do similar things to both of these websites.
I was born 34 years ago in Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In the 20 years I lived there, I never met anyone who killed a bear with their bare hands, but I've met plenty of people with the same brutish, thuggish humor, who thought that kind of stuff was hilarious.
If there's one thing I would like to say to Tomislav, it's this: I'm proud of our nations' history and cultural heritage -- some shared, some not -- but this kind of negative publicity you're generating is part of the reason why there's a word "balkanized" in English language. I understand you're pissed they copied your hard work and your anger is justified. But please, don't do this.
Your message would probably come across clearer if you add a concrete example the behavior you want avoided and what you think the consequences are for not doing so.
I can't decide if it's a general aversion to public complaining, or if this company is really as arrogant and self important as this article made them out to be. In fact, after the thuggish threats, I'm pretty sure it's arrogance.
I'm not sure about what OP was thinking, but I felt the same way. The article seemed to have mixed messages. One was, "how dare you steal from us" and the other was "Everyone steals".
Looking at the two sites, they were both using such common web design styles these days, that I would have assumed they both based their site off of someone else's.
If I were them, I would have stuck to the second argument, realized that no idea or design is a unique snowflake and everyone steals constantly.
"But after some thought, Darko, our design lead (he's a very nice person) convinced me to give you guys the benefit of the doubt and not send the Croatian emmigration in Australia (known for working as bouncers and construction workers) knocking at your door."
Yeah. You tend to lose the moral initiative when you pretend you have the backing of some nefarious street thugs.
I think he's referring to how they are arrogant for threatening them, sending them "design tips", and playing themselves up as sexy and dangerous all in the same message.
They definitely have a valid point about the plagiarism but they're being really cocky and showy about it.
Edit: Ya, they might have been trying to be funny or venting, I can understand that. But they really shouldn't have ANY kind of physical threat in there at all. Its childish and just pointless posturing.
No need for a jQuery plugin, it's simple to do. I noticed it too and looked through their JS and found it to be way more complicated than it needs, using jQuery.
I worked at an AV company where I wrote a small video capture application that feature some basic CMS features. After a while it started to become a pain to maintain, so we decided to look for something off the shelf. The first vendor to come in and demo a product showed us a UI that was our design, pixel for pixel, with only the name changed.
Are you sure that wasn't intentional? In enterprise sales, it's fairly common to customize the demo to the client. I've been in situations where we deliberately made our software match the prospect's branding as closely as possible.
Responding well to them? Their design is a standard template - slider below a menu, 3 columns below that, brands/testimonials below that, large footer. The only similarities I really see are the structure of the templates, and both look like they're from bootstrap, so I'm not sure what the stealing is complaining about.
I wonder if you're design blind? I've met a few people like that before. If that's all you think there is to a design, the 'standard' layout, you've missed a lot.
Are you seriously going to tell me you can't see the similarity between:
That most websites don't have that curve, or the spacing on the left/right or the little bar above the menu rather than below or any of the things that screams a rip? Then scroll down to the footer and they're identical.
Go open any other software consultancy website and see if you can see those same similarities?
There's so much more to a design than just the grid layout.
I've seen this happen myself at a company I consulted for, they told the designer they wanted a website that looked like X's website, so the designer pretty much cloned the website, moved a couple of things around and changed the logo. Client thought it was wonderful.
On a separate note, does anyone else find the indenting of the HTML on the infinum site to be very odd?
I'd say I'm design blind. From the examples in the post I would say, yes the sites have a passing similarity, but many, many company webpages look very similar to those two. The color schemes and layout details are different, the logos are quite different and the wording is different. So, to me, this is not plagiarism. Perhaps a telling comment on the sameness of a lot of design on the web.
I was thinking the same until I saw the run through. It seems quite obvious that they copied, to the extent that even minor details are there. However, I still think that the design is a trend, and it's a common pattern that you'll find hundreds (thousands?) of sites follow, not to say copy. And it's obvious that Infinium did not come up with the style.
I would like to see if they used similar CSS classes (which anyone probably can check in 5 minutes, but we can't be bothered... it's a common design pattern, yeah).
I'll copy what I wrote in another comment: Um, did you know that "awards" in the software industry are a sort of marketing gray area where companies pay a lot for a submission to some "organization" who then hands out "awards" and "nomiations" that can be advertized on websites?
They are pretty similar. Because of popular UI frameworks, large sites dedicated to design (and design trends in general), it's pretty normal for me to run into two web sites that look so similar I have to wonder if they're part of the same company.
Is there any other evidence that this was a copy or that the design was intentionally lifted and tweaked/modified from infinium, such as large swaths of JS (not from an open source library) or something ridiculous like a failure to remove your copyright, css elements that are unused on their site but used on yours, id tags in the html and the like that are unique enough to clearly have been copy/paste? Have these guys copied other things belonging to infinium?
I agree with others on the kudos: this was fun way to handle suspected plagiarism.
Well I'm sorry Infinum, at least their site does something when I click the tabs across the top.
OK, looks like you're doing some sort of pjaxing of the content; problem being there is none of the usual browser feedback that suggests I should wait, seeing as your site is probably under more load that normal.
Suggestion: if you're going to use pjax-style techniques, show some sort of progress indicator when the request takes longer than a few seconds... or don't use pjax-techniques when they're really not necessary.
Every time a post like this hits Hacker News, the same conversation gets re-hashed again and again. "How is this copying?", "How are these two sites not just following standard design trends?", "So what. This layout isn't unique. It looks like a Wordpress template.", "Design inspiration isn't enough. Show me the copied code."
And each time, I'm baffled by these responses. How can you not tell, when comparing the sites side-by-side, that Kintek was more than just inspired by Infinum's design. Sure, neither site really trend-sets, but there are numerous similarities between the two which, in combination, are highly unlikely to have been arrived at independently. And that's the point. The site was carefully crafted, each detail at a time, to look, feel, and act a certain way. Not every detail will be unique to this site and this site alone, but in combination the details add up to a unique experience. Which Kintek then co-opted for itself.
Everything from the fonts, to the way the page starts to scroll, to the width and spacing of the grid, the curve of the main image slider, the order of the content, the actual copy (almost word-for-word on the "Services" page)... Seeing all of this, and then seeing someone on HN say "so what"... it just boggles my mind.
I'm not even a designer, but perhaps I just tend look at the world more through that lense. I don't know how else to explain it. To me, it's so obvious and glaring, but maybe when others look at these sites they just don't see the same things that I do.
Marketers take note. This link could also be titled "How to properly deal with plagiarism of your own website." Acting like a good sport with an even better sense of humor will win you many customers.
The closest that post admits to anything is "We do agree that we have over-stepped the line of flattery vs plagiarism. Please give us time and we will try and rectify this as soon as we get a chance.".
Everything else is kind of like.... No big deal. Egg in the face. Haha, we'll fix it.
They should have just been more clear, like, "Yes, we pretty much copied your design. We love what you guys came up with. It was wrong of us to blatantly steal your perfectly crafted masterpiece, but we just couldn't help ourselves... We are inferior."
I don't see why the plagiarist went to the effort of copying the site. Equally overdesigned, cheap, tacky looking (oh hello jQuery slider) 'designs' are readily available on ThemeForest for $45.
Hah, I just finished (?) dealing with a site that literally just scraped our entire Education Industry news site -- all pages -- using some sort of "save for offline" tool and then did a find/replace to change the name and redrew the logos in what might have been MS Paint.
They were shopping the site to ad networks. Maybe they thought they could out-SEO us and then monetize the traffic? Or it was some sort of click fraud long-con? The WHOIS was in Virginia, but the IP that did the scraping was in China.
Totally weird, but I took it as a compliment. Our content was worth stealing, after all.
They also missed a single external file -- a call to our ad server -- when they scraped the site. So I "hacked" it by serving them a special JS file to add funny autoplaying youtube videos to the page and switch all the fonts to Comic Sans. (Didn't want to nuke the whole site while waiting for the hosting company to investigate my DMCA complaint.)
Man these guys are tripping. I see some resemblance but really how can you complain about someone following the same design trends that you are. Sorry to say if this is plagiarism, then so is 90% of the web.
No, not even close. No code was reused, any parts similar were reworked as far as I can see.
A real shame they didn't dial it back and make it a fun article. Inspiration is something we all use.
If I inspired someone so much they went off and made something similar that would make me proud.
This wasn't a stolen 'code and all' website, at best 'some' parts that are pointed out as similar were recoded and reworked, as far as I can see. That's hard work.
In our brave new information-sharing world, the time to start worrying is when you create something and it isn't plagiarized.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a job ad to help the startup I was working at hire programmers. I spent a lot of time getting the words just right to attract the right candidates.
And then, shortly after our ad hit the Internet, some other company copied it, nearly verbatim, and started using it to hire exactly the candidates we were trying to reach. [1] And then, a month or so later, I found that the ad copy was making rounds on the usual job sites, having been adopted by a number of recruiters and companies wanting to hire programmers skilled at functional programming.
At first, I was angry. But then I realized that plagiarism is the new normal. If you write something and it's on the Internet, it's going to be plagiarized.
Unless it's not worth plagiarizing.
But that bar is so low that, if you're not hitting it, ...
> You should probably link your client logotypes to their respective websites. If they don't have website at least to Wikipedia or something.
In cases like this, I'd recommend linking to a case-study or other type of portfolio page about the client. I'd rather not send potential customers to another site where they might not come back.
Unfortunately, the title is very misleading. I was looking forward to reading about how to "properly" do it.
Website plagiarism is one of the hardest things to prove because the proof can't be design similarity; even though, the website's design is intellectual property and copyrighted. The de facto for website developers has been to include a code in their images and to replace common design elements with company logos (or graphics specific to their organization).
Has the website in question taken graphics and company-specific elements as well? No, they haven't; so, there isn't enough to claim plagiarism. I think both websites are using common layout designs.
Could be a misdirection. Put another way, perhaps Infinum copied Kintek and are attempting to win the perception war. Put yet another way, perhaps the infinum developer didn't tell the boss where he got the inspiration over six months.
This website itself is not designed so well. The fixed top bar is super annoying and wastes space. (Yes, I know it's also a modern design trend. It's a terrible one.) Their site is too wide somewhere, and forces an unnecessary horizontal scroll bar on my browser. Their logo/header is pretty cool, but the rest of the site is pretty generic.
There were so many "they copied us" threads on HN, that I am starting to think that the tactic is being used to promote author's own services, rather than to serve as something else.
Copying a website like they've done is probably harder than starting from some sort of (paid for) theme or template site - don't know why they wouldn't have just done that.
