How to properly plagiarize a website (opens in new tab)

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.

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/files/246-dgb-uneasy-legac...

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30D16FF3B5B1...

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.

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.

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.

“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.

http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borro...

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?

It looks like they both have taken from twitter bootstrap. Both look like very uninspired marketing sites. Infinum, get over yourselves.

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.

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.

Replacing the title with "Come back! We miss you!" when you leave the tab is cute but it makes finding the article in a sea of tabs difficult.

The best part is that the plagiarized site is a nominee for a css design prize?

Infinum is one of the top developers here in Croatia. Nice to see them responding well to this.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kintek has just posted an apology, of sorts: http://kintek.com.au/blog/getting-egg-on-your-face/

This article smells like self importance.

Wow, someone's been drinking their own Kool Aid.

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.

Firstly, your layout isn't unique, but more importantly the website in question didn't do anything illegal or immoral.

You followed pretty standard layout designs that are simply attributed to the responsive web revolution.

Your site uses the stereotypical responsive website layout. One could even say you stole your design from 1000's of other websites before you.

This (now dead) website was fun. (http://pirated-sites.com/)

Perhaps there's a niche for a replacement?

EDIT: there appears to be a Flikr stream to replace it. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/piratedsites/)

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.)

I love the not-so-veiled threats to send bouncers knocking on their door and rip them to pieces with their bare (bear?) hands!

LOL...The irony. They wrote an article a in 2011 about plagerism.

http://kintek.com.au/blog/web-design-plagerism-what-should-y...

The best thing is that they are nominated to some Design Award http://cssdesignawards.com/search.php?search_term=kintek&sea...

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.

'Plagiarize'? 'Stealing'?

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.

This is the best response to an issue like this that I've ever seen.

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, ...

[1] http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2011-07-10-good-enough-to-stea...

> 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.

Both web sites look generic to me.

What a classy way to slap someone in the face. Full marks!

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.

It seems to be down for me, anyone have a mirror?

I would be embarrassed to spend that time writing that blog post when both sites look like templates.

Did anyone else get an Internal Server Error after reading about half of the article?

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.

I remember Davor Suker!

I applaud you, sir. And your website, which is very elegant.

China does this all the time.