We have put a LOT of work into our website at www.gurock.com. We didn’t even use any template for it. That’s why we were surprised to see that another ISV used the exact same website design as ours. They just changed the content, the logo and some icons. The rest of the site, including parts of the HTML, CSS and even some images were copied. Even the layout, position of screenshots, buttons and the content style of the SmartInspect homepage is copied on their product sites.
I don’t want to post any screenshots or links just yet, as I hope that they will take the website down after this posting and after the email I sent them. I don’t have a problem with people who take some ideas from our website. This has happened before with some smaller elements and with our shop (which I documented in an article, so this was OK). But taking our entire website, changing the content and uploading it to a software company website, well … that is definitive too much.
Yes, I’m a bit angry right now and I can’t understand why some people want to build a business with a stolen website. Is there anything else we can do to protect our website design besides contacting the offending company?
10 Comments
Maybe this is not the right post to tell you guys, but I find your website awesome. Nice work!
I can understand your anger.
Thank you very much JAG, that’s nice to hear.
You can always a tool to encrypt/obfuscate the HTML so it can still be read by the browser but the users can’t copy it and change the content. (There are some tools in the market which do that.)
If they don’t take off the design, you can :
1) Post their website here
2) Contact their web host and ask them to take the website down.
I also agree that this is deplorable. Though I certainly don’t condone it perhaps you can take some satisfaction that they thought enough of your design to steal it. It you publish the site here however it could serve as a warning to potential visitors to their site concerning their ethics.
I wouldn’t condone this sort of thing either, but the impact probably depends upon whether they’re a competitor. If they are, then it might be a serious problem if they’re trying to confuse potential buyers. If they’ve got a product in an unrelated market, then I would wonder if there’s much actual harm.
Designs are a hard thing to protect. You can obfuscate HTML code with certain tools, as someone mentioned above, but that does nothing to stop someone from using your overall site design. Almost every popular site I know of has been duplicated to some degree.
If they’ve crossed the line here, then contact them and ask for changes. If they respond abusively (or not at all), then you might be able to embarrass them a little by posting their URL here. If they’re competitors, then it’s a bit more serious in my opinion.
1) Find out who they host their site with.
2) DMCA the host.
3) Site comes down.
Problem solved.
(Optional before Step 2, post their URL so we can all point and go “Shaaaame!”)
Thanks for all the ideas guys. I’m in touch with the offending company and they are taking the site down and get a new design. If they stand by their words, which I hope, I won’t name the company/site here.
Jason: I know that protecting a design isn’t easy and I’m OK if others use some smaller ideas from our site, but taking the entire design and just changing the content and the logo is really too much. They aren’t really in the same market segment as we are (we are in the dev tools market), but they are still a software company in the B2B market and IMHO it’s highly likely that we have the same visitors from time to time.
My main problem with seeing our design stolen is the fact that it makes our website look like a generic template that we got from some random template website for $35. This really devaluates our website and the effort we put into it.
Anyway, I will post an update when the site is hopefully taken down in the next days.
That’s just really sad… If they have so little imagination in their website design, I can’t imagine trying to use one of their products…
A Google for one of the phrases on the Gurock site finds the offending site easily enough.
Five points for creativity Sherlock. Please note though that the site has already been changed, so it’s not in the original state that I found it in. It’s still too similar IMO and I’m in touch with the owner to get it changed.