What to do when someone steals your design

Over the weekend, one of our friends Ed Gain, pointed out a website with amazing similarities to our site. I had a quick look and what do you know, they are very similar indeed.

Now I’m not saying that this person / company stole our design (we’ve got so litigious as a country I wouldn’t be that stupid), I’m guessing it was just an amazing coincidence.

Anyway, this brings about the opportunity to do a post on what to do when someone does steal your design (not that I’m saying this person / company has). Most of this is taken from a great article written by the excellent Cameron Chapman for the equally excellent Smashing Magazine.

First things first

Make a coffee, go for a walk, have a laugh about it BUT DO NOT GET MAD! So many of life’s biggest mistakes have been made from rash, knee jerk reactions so take a deep breath and do the following:

Gather evidence
Get together all the information you need, this could include screenshots (as many as possible), contact details for the site in question, check out Nominet (or do a global whois) to see when the domain was registered, do a traceroute to see where the domain is hosted, check when you first put your design live and made it publicly available and make a note of how you came to notice the questionable site.
Send a courteous message to them
There is no point ruffling feathers, it may be an honest mistake and they may be silly enough to think that taking your design is all ok. I would recommend that you contact them in writing, whether by email or letter. If you are sending an email it might be worth adding a delivery and read receipt to the email. If you are sending a letter, you could send it recorded delivery.
At the end of the day this may not stand up in a court (if it goes that far) but it is all useful information to keep.
Your message should point out that their design and yours are very similar and may be in breach of copyright. You could also ask that they take their site down whilst this is resolved.
Please remember I am no legal expert
Wait for a response.
If you don’t hear back you can contact their ISP and point out the issue – their ISP may take down their website for you, although from experience ISPs aren’t quick to do this unless some governmental body has requested it.
Make it public
If you don’t hear anything back then make it public. You could write a blog post, submit it to sites, send an email out to all your customers about it etc. As the Smashing Magazine article suggests you could get a lot of backing from others out there – no designer, no matter what field they work in, likes to see any other designers hard work ripped off.

For more information take a look at this great article.

Since writing this we have contacted the company in question and they have taken down their website with an apology – the matter is now closed.

The message we received from the offending person was:

I am very sorry that the 2 sites are similar. I am just a freelancer looking for work and really just made the xxxxxxx xxxxx site as an example site of my work. It is influeneced by your site and others , and i appollogise for the obvious simillarities. I will take it down for now whilst i make sufficient alterations.

We have blurred out the company name and details in the images but have still put the images up to show everyone just how blatant some people can be. To reemphasize, we consider this matter closed, we all make mistakes!