Comments on: Getting Away With Murder: Design Rip-Off Horror Stories

By: Dave C

Dave C — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:10:30 +0000

If you end up in a situation like Stuartc1 where the thief is still hot-linking to your site, a great revenge technique it to rename those files for your own site, and then swap in any content you want to serve to his site from annoying to stupid to totally offensive. :-)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hotlink+revenge

By: JonGos

JonGos — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:51:55 +0000

@TVSpy, that’s pretty incredible. I’d go out of my way to punish someone who lied to my face about stealing!

By: kristarella

kristarella — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:31:42 +0000

Smart post, good tips.

I was about to post about a rip this week, but I wanted to give the target a chance and emailed him warning him (I know, I’m such a softy). He took the ripped design down and I told him where to get high quality free designs.

Many people are cavaleir and malicious in stealing designs and content… unfortunately some are just stupid and don’t understand plagarism.

By: TVSpy

TVSpy — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:06:26 +0000

Well I was on a host that I was set to leave and move to another host. The owner started snooping through my stuff (didn’t know it at the time), then the guy started contacting me and asking me how my site ran (mind you this was a pretty cool php cms script system) and not thinking much of it I explained it in brief to him. It was a stupid mistake on my part but I didn’t think he would try to steal my site. Turns out the guy went around to other forums took my script around the time I left and was trying to sell my script to others. When I found out I contacted him and he made up this BS excuse about how he was a designer and he wasn’t trying to sell my stuff, but just selling the subdomain I had been using.

I didn’t believe him, but I let it go. Then I later found a few forum posts he had made where it was clear he was trying to sell the site – in fact even said “I’m selling the script” and he went on to say how he didn’t create it and that it was someone on his host, and he then proceeded to describe what I had explained to him about how it worked (only I had only told him minute details so he didn’t have the full picture). In case you’re wondering, the host/guy was Synced.org – unbelievable, I haven’t contacted the guy since – I don’t think he made a sale on it, but still what a sleazebag.

By: Mike Robinson

Mike Robinson — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:05:09 +0000

Great post. I’ve yet to have any of my designs stolen (as far as I know!) but I have had content stolen and images leeched. I did blog about it and eventually the content was taken down, but only after several comments, emails and some image replacement. The image they leeched from me didn’t have width and height restrictions, so I uploaded a huge banner stating that the content was stolen and that I wanted it down.

Don’t tolerate having your content stolen, give ‘em hell!

By: Janko

Janko — Sat, 31 May 2008 06:01:38 +0000

Yeah, I agree on that, excellent idea! What a great article!

By: Laura

Laura — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:00:00 +0000

I really like the idea of adding stolen works to your portfolio! Smart :)