My Very Own Dolly

This happened at the chopping block all the time. I would say we had about 8 websites completely ripped off. One time someone took a screenshot of the site, did a color shift and then simply changed the text in the logo. Crazy. At least Krooning was all redrawn... But yeah, that rabbit is pretty damn funny.

You won the "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" award :)

A few months ago one of my company sites was ripped off in its entirety by... some Estonian crooks. All they did, basically, was a global search & replace to swap their name with ours.

Statistically it does not mean anything with respect to web design in Estonia, though :-)

"Inspired by" is always good. Lets face it - your designs are pretty darn pleasant, easy on the eyes, well designed, I can go on... It is not good when they flat out steal.

Weblogs don't count though because they look the same to me.

At least they did redraw it from scratch - consider it an homage. As noted on flazoom.com, there are about ninety-umpteen copies of the 2advanced site / house style out there. Sometimes it's lazy coders, but sometimes it's clients that demand a site that looks just like some other one they've fixated on. Like CEOs that insist that the site become more "blue" and incorporate flying zeroes and ones "just like in The Matrix."

It does lack the sense of sophistication and refinement of yours.

Have y'all seen Pirated Sites? The first time I saw it, I was floored by some of the blatent copying going on. For example, this is their current feature: Original and the Copy. Open these two in browser tabs and flip back and forth.

Congrats on your rip! I suppose it does mean you've qualified your designs enought that others deem them both Good and True, enough so to at least borrow them to advance their career or personal life. It is flattering when done once or twice but after a few times you're just all 'arrrg'. Still, as Wilde says, talent borrows, genius steals... we can only just hope that the rip will be at least good or better than the org. site!

My big beef with rips is when someone rips a Flash site off! Flash isn't exactly easy to produce and requires a functional understanding of sound, movement, and programming. If someone like this yahoo rips a site fully developed in Flash, why couldn't he just spent 4 mins on developing a different site! Literally the easiest part of Flash is the interface. They still had to get all the code, all the music, all the tweens, etc, and make it work.

Perhaps AS2 will help privitize .swf files more so

The "we want it like that one" statement on clients' part is an all-too-familiar scene in my day-to day... but I know better, heh. Although I have more than eight years producing sites, I never have seen a case of me being ripped off, perhaps because my designs are not "cool" or "trendy" enough... either that, or I probably don't care enough about it.

And yes, Pirated Sites is first thing that comes to mind in cases like these.

Never have I seen such a blatant case of false advertising since I sued the makers of the "Never Ending Story."

The fact that you even call this a 'copy' is a true example of a good nature. This is sad and the bunny makes me angry.

I remember seeing a complete rip off of www.kleber.net. It looked like he just copied pages and inserted his 'I've got photoshop filters and I'm gonna use em' artwork. I sent the guy a 'hey buddy, at least you could change the background color' email and his reply started with the most colorful language you can imagine.

I think the shame of it is that these guys obviously have talent, but they just couldn't think of anything original to do.

I also think when you compare the two that your site is obviously a lot better.

The same thing happened with homestarrunner.com

Basicly some guys were making a toon called the Strong Bad Matrix. Instead of redrawing the characters, they used the actual flash files from the site and manipulated those.

It wasn't long after the Chapmans threatened to sue that the site was removed.

Oh, so that's why they had to add the Legal Stuff link on the bottom of HomeStarRunner ... hehe, Homestar's so funny. He said, "Boring."

Todd,

You might already know this, but when you preview your post first, and then post it, you lose the URL in the textfield (so then when you post, the hyperlink is your email when you really wanted it to be your site). As you might have guessed, it just now happened to me. If someone has already pointed that out to you, I apologize.

"Boring."

Oh, Homestar. Stop it.

I think your just noticing similaritys in aspects of media the "media" being something that is flash based. How many ways are there to do clouds in flash? How many ways are there to do rolling hills? Everybody is derivitive. EVERYBODY. get over it. you are too.

Haha. Here's another recent pirated site: www.heathenfront.org/ copied www.zilmer.com and looks sweet ;)
Its misfortunate when people have so little imagination that they copy things 1:1

But Krooning looks funny doesn't it ;))))

If I was you, I would launch a copyright suite and sue them for all of their money mwuahaha. lol. Bye

just last week i had found someone had blatantly copied my blog's design, stole some images and even bits of my content. i wasn't really offended, more amused that they managed to come up with a new moniker to fit my logo. ch.am.p. originally stood for chinese american princess. this person renamed his site to chinese ambassador of peking. you can read about it and see screenshots here (the owner of ch.amp. no. 2 has taken down his site)
http://www.chineseamericanprincess.com/?blogger/archives/2003_08_01_index.html#106152814759492703

the sad part is the fakester had an external message board embedded in a frame on his site, so my friends went to town on him. i felt kind of bad after seeing so many you suck fools. after receiving a poorly written apology i think the fakester was a young kid looking to start a blog and didn't know much about plagiarism. the external board is still up. now we've sort of turned it into a food blog.

aw, c'mon. i don't see the similarity. there's a huge difference between deciduous trees and conifers.

http://www.thelongwinters.com/

hey todd, this should further discussion a bit. I don't consider it a rip of your site at all, but the first time i saw it, my thought was, "wow... feels just like wdik".
hmmm maybe i should always spell your url out, instead of using an acronym.

Also if you havent checked out the long winters yet, you will really dig them. "Stupid" will break your heart. I learned about them on KEXP.org which is the only radio ive ever heard to rival your old show in charleston.

--rob

No, I know the guy who designed the Long Winters' site -- he did not rip off WDIK.