10 ms·

How to properly plagiarize a website

303 points by reisub 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
websitescenes 13y ago
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.
robbyking 13y ago
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.
- jdlshore 13y ago
  Are you sure that wasn't intentional? In enterprise sales, it's fairly common to customize the demo to the client. I've been in situations where we deliberately made our software match the prospect's branding as closely as possible.
tokenadult 13y ago
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-legacy.pdf http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/files/246-dgb-uneasy-legac... http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30D16FF3B5B11738DDDAC0A94D9405B888DF1D3 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.
- heyitsnick 13y ago
  That's a great story about Nelotsky, I hadn't heard that before. For those interested, these fake entries to catch copyright infringement are commonly referred to as "Mountweazels". They are common in maps (fake towns, roads) and dictionaries (fake words and definitions). You can read more on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
  - kstop 13y ago
    Also catching on in celebrity baby photos: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/kim-kardashian-plants-fake-baby-photos-weeds-out-greedy-friends-reports-say/article12824119/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/kim-karda...
    - hello_newman 13y ago
      Unbelievable. I have new found respect for Kim Kardashian. That was incredibly smart.
      - contacternst 13y ago
        You mean you didn't already have respect for Kim's contribution to protecting privacy on the internet?!
- jere 13y ago
  Like heyitsnick said, that sounds like trap streets and Esquivalience. The thing I always wondered is if these fictitious items weren't actually hurtful to the reputation of the company creating them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esquivalience http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esquivalience
jdmitch 13y ago
I love the not-so-veiled threats to send bouncers knocking on their door and rip them to pieces with their bare (bear?) hands!
- hiddenfeatures 13y ago
  "These business men are here to tell you why you are going to break your leg tomorrow" - I love that :-)
glanotte 13y ago
What a classy way to slap someone in the face. Full marks!
OliC 13y ago
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.
- grundprinzip 13y ago
  It's an awesome eye-catcher, they should make a JQuery plugin (if it doesn't already exist). And the code is rather (minified) simple: https://gist.github.com/grundprinzip/5868304 https://gist.github.com/grundprinzip/5868304
  - Killswitch 13y ago
    No need for a jQuery plugin, it's simple to do. I noticed it too and looked through their JS and found it to be way more complicated than it needs, using jQuery. http://jsfiddle.net/Killswitch/BSukL/show/ http://jsfiddle.net/Killswitch/BSukL/show/ Nothing on the page but the code, so open that in a new tab and swap tabs to see it in action.
- bluetidepro 13y ago
  I completely agree. It's awesome in theory, but I would hate this feature if tons of sites started using it. It could get out of hand very quickly.
  - recursive 13y ago
    I don't know what theory it's awesome under, but I have to disagree with that. I want titles to describe the content of their page.
- brokentone 13y ago
  I didn't find it cute, but rather annoying.
jmduke 13y ago
This is the best response to an issue like this that I've ever seen.
pipecork 13y ago
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.
- Samuel_Michon 13y ago
  > Acting like a good sport with an even better sense of humor will win you many customers. I agree, they should’ve done that. As the post is now, I don’t feel it is especially funny and I don’t see them being a good sport either.
- ciderpunx 13y ago
  Not titling it with a split infinitive would have got my vote </pedantry>
Ygor 13y ago
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.
- lighthazard 13y ago
  Responding well to them? Their design is a standard template - slider below a menu, 3 columns below that, brands/testimonials below that, large footer. The only similarities I really see are the structure of the templates, and both look like they're from bootstrap, so I'm not sure what the stealing is complaining about.
  - eyko 13y ago
    I was thinking the same until I saw the run through. It seems quite obvious that they copied, to the extent that even minor details are there. However, I still think that the design is a trend, and it's a common pattern that you'll find hundreds (thousands?) of sites follow, not to say copy. And it's obvious that Infinium did not come up with the style. I would like to see if they used similar CSS classes (which anyone probably can check in 5 minutes, but we can't be bothered... it's a common design pattern, yeah).
  - mattmanser 13y ago
    I wonder if you're design blind? I've met a few people like that before. If that's all you think there is to a design, the 'standard' layout, you've missed a lot. Are you seriously going to tell me you can't see the similarity between: http://www.infinum.co/services http://www.infinum.co/services http://kintek.com.au/services/ http://kintek.com.au/services/ That most websites don't have that curve, or the spacing on the left/right or the little bar above the menu rather than below or any of the things that screams a rip? Then scroll down to the footer and they're identical. Go open any other software consultancy website and see if you can see those same similarities? There's so much more to a design than just the grid layout. I've seen this happen myself at a company I consulted for, they told the designer they wanted a website that looked like X's website, so the designer pretty much cloned the website, moved a couple of things around and changed the logo. Client thought it was wonderful. On a separate note, does anyone else find the indenting of the HTML on the infinum site to be very odd?
jgrahamc 13y ago
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.
- danielweber 13y ago
  I worked at a company where the competitor included our typos in their product. Good times, good times.
- jevin 13y ago
  Same experience here. The guy even hotlinked our Javascript files. Little did he know that we could have controlled his website from where we were.
  - thejacenxpress 13y ago
    alert("we steal");
    - sneak 13y ago
      You only trigger the alert on 1% of page loads, otherwise they fix it quickly. ;D
- euroclydon 13y ago
  Boy-oh-boy I wish Google would lock analytics IDs down to a domain. Somebody in a university in Mexico City copied mine into a project they have in their www directory, and I just had to regex filter it out of GA.
  - k__ 13y ago
    seems like the amount of people who do this is rather big. Google probably thinks it's a good way to track users of websites that aren't their customers :D
- 13y ago
bluetidepro 13y ago
It seems to be down for me, anyone have a mirror?
- kbojody 13y ago
  http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.infinum.co/the-capsized-eight/articles/how-to-properly-plagiarize-a-website http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
- SpikedCola 13y ago
  If you search Google for "cache:[interesting url]", it will take you directly to their cache for the page, if it exists
croisillon 13y ago
The best thing is that they are nominated to some Design Award http://cssdesignawards.com/search.php?search_term=kintek&search=search http://cssdesignawards.com/search.php?search_term=kintek&sea...
scottrogers86 13y ago
It looks like they both have taken from twitter bootstrap. Both look like very uninspired marketing sites. Infinum, get over yourselves.
- outworlder 13y ago
  And why is that a problem? Isn't the whole idea of bootstrap to serve as a starting point?
  - scottrogers86 13y ago
    It's not a problem. I'm just saying that Infinum seems to think they came up with a certain layout. When in reality, it just came from bootstrap.
- mmuro 13y ago
  This. Kintek was clearly inspired by what Infinum did, especially on some of the graphical elements. But they both appear, on a code level, to be Twitter Bootstrap. Infinum definitely needs to get over themselves.
- ssharp 13y ago
  Bootstrap provides a slim set of tools for constructing a website. The power comes in it's components, mobile-readiness, and extensibility. Going from default Bootstrap to either of these two sites would still take a lot of design work. You can also see the linked article's author talking about specific design decisions they made that aren't made by default Bootstrap. I think a more accurate critique would be to look at some of the templates on Wrap Bootstrap. A lot of them do similar things to both of these websites.
- EthanEtienne 13y ago
  Yea this is a very common design pattern.
mdip 13y ago
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.
dasil003 13y ago
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.
- euxneks 13y ago
  Did you guys write an article about that? That sounds supremely interesting.
  - ChrisAntaki 13y ago
    Agreed, this speaks well to the frontend that was built.
  - jkimmel 13y ago
    I too would love to see a write up of some sort. Now that, that sounds like flattery.
  - gtd 13y ago
    We did not publicize it in any way because we are a legit film streaming company with hundreds of distributors worldwide, and no good can come from any awareness of a site that looks like ours streaming pirated content. Maybe some day.
gearoidoc 13y ago
I remember Davor Suker!
- donretag 13y ago
  Sukerman! Hrvatska's best world cup.
johndbritton 13y ago
> 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.
wwwarhawk 13y ago
This article smells like self importance.
- MrBra 13y ago
  Ok, share your hard drive with us, let us download something you've worked on for 6 months and then complain.
kamakazizuru 13y ago
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?
- Udo 13y ago
  You're not alone. In fact, at first I thought their sites were standard Wordpress templates. I was kind of surprised they actually built them by hand. They both consist solely of what I would consider standard elements and layouts.
  - muloka 13y ago
    I am pretty certain that the Kintek website is a Wordpress site built using the Roots Starter Theme. Based on the fact they use: * Make use of both the Yoast SEO and Gravity Forms plugins, which are well known Wordpress plugins. * Twitter Bootstrap * Have an /assets/ folder which most likely rewrites to /wp-content/themes/themename/assets/ * Have a /plugins/ folder which most likely rewrites to /wp-content/plugins/
- websitescenes 13y ago
  Yes, I just posted the same sentiments before I saw your comment.
- lawnchair_larry 13y ago
  Yes
- eranation 13y ago
  Nope, I'm with you. I've seen much more obvious plagiarisms. Although it's obvious that Kintek were more than a little inspired by infinum, and indeed some items look copied as is except the color change, the rest looks like any other bootstrap / grid based marketing site template. They might have pushed the "inspiration" part to the limit, and might deserve the post for not being too original, but I'm sure you can find thousands of sites that have similar elements and statistically, some of them copied from someone else. And I'm sure infinium were also inspired (even subconsciously) from other designers. Almost every other site today has a dark header, a Mac screen / laptop carousel, slide scroll / parallax / infinite scrolling and a 3 column grid using the same icon fonts, dark 3 column footer with links, partners / as seen on techcrunch / customer logos in gray emboss. everyone has it. Although it's clear they copied, you could find sites that have these elements that didn't copy (or copied from someone else). So it's just the number of similar elements that is annoying, not each element individually IMHO.
DanBC 13y ago
This (now dead) website was fun. (http://pirated-sites.com/ 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/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/piratedsites/)
yashodhan 13y ago
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.
- gk1 13y ago
  What? Are you saying they are arrogant for outing a plagiarizer?
  - andrew_gardener 13y ago
    I think he's referring to how they are arrogant for threatening them, sending them "design tips", and playing themselves up as sexy and dangerous all in the same message. They definitely have a valid point about the plagiarism but they're being really cocky and showy about it. Edit: Ya, they might have been trying to be funny or venting, I can understand that. But they really shouldn't have ANY kind of physical threat in there at all. Its childish and just pointless posturing.
    - gk1 13y ago
      I thought they were just trying to be slightly funny.
    - euxneks 13y ago
      I think they are a bit angry and venting a bit..
  - icco 13y ago
    I'm not sure about what OP was thinking, but I felt the same way. The article seemed to have mixed messages. One was, "how dare you steal from us" and the other was "Everyone steals". Looking at the two sites, they were both using such common web design styles these days, that I would have assumed they both based their site off of someone else's. If I were them, I would have stuck to the second argument, realized that no idea or design is a unique snowflake and everyone steals constantly.
chunsaker 13y ago
I applaud you, sir. And your website, which is very elegant.
stordoff 13y ago
Did anyone else get an Internal Server Error after reading about half of the article?
duncans 13y ago
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.
antitrust 13y ago
Both web sites look generic to me.
dustinfarris 13y ago
China does this all the time.
- msie 13y ago
  And so does the rest of the world. What's your point?
CodeMage 13y ago
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.
- davorak 13y ago
  > don't do this. Your message would probably come across clearer if you add a concrete example the behavior you want avoided and what you think the consequences are for not doing so.
kristianc 13y ago
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.
eli 13y ago
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.)
- pestaa 13y ago
  Autoplaying videos are fine, but... Comic Sans?! That's just evil. Good luck with the hosting company.
shelltreader 13y ago
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.
- EthanEtienne 13y ago
  I think I misread your comment, you wanted the article to be a how-to on how to plagiarize?
Samuel_Michon 13y ago
“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-borrow-great-poets-steal/ http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borro...
- kenperkins 13y ago
  This has been addressed on http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/ tl;dr: In conclusion, in 1892 an important precursor of this family of expressions was published. The author was W. H. Davenport Adams, and his words may have influenced the version that T. H. Eliot published in 1920.
  - andrewflnr 13y ago
    How delightfully meta.
    - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
      “How to properly plagiarize a quote”
spacecadet 13y ago
I would be embarrassed to spend that time writing that blog post when both sites look like templates.
tmoertel 13y ago
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-steal.html http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2011-07-10-good-enough-to-stea...
snedzad 13y ago
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.
Tpsoc 13y ago
LOL...The irony. They wrote an article a in 2011 about plagerism. http://kintek.com.au/blog/web-design-plagerism-what-should-you-do-when-someone-steals-your-content/ http://kintek.com.au/blog/web-design-plagerism-what-should-y...
- msantos 13y ago
  Here a screenshot, just in case they decide to take that blog offline http://i.imgur.com/Duyq1N4.png http://i.imgur.com/Duyq1N4.png
Duhck 13y ago
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.
aaron695 13y ago
'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.
Smudge 13y ago
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.
wizardhat 13y ago
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.
timack 13y ago
Kintek has just posted an apology, of sorts: http://kintek.com.au/blog/getting-egg-on-your-face/ http://kintek.com.au/blog/getting-egg-on-your-face/
- donutdan4114 13y ago
  The closest that post admits to anything is "We do agree that we have over-stepped the line of flattery vs plagiarism. Please give us time and we will try and rectify this as soon as we get a chance.". Everything else is kind of like.... No big deal. Egg in the face. Haha, we'll fix it. They should have just been more clear, like, "Yes, we pretty much copied your design. We love what you guys came up with. It was wrong of us to blatantly steal your perfectly crafted masterpiece, but we just couldn't help ourselves... We are inferior."
impresario 13y ago
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.
damian2000 13y ago
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.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

303 points by reisub 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

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.

robbyking 13y ago

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.

jdlshore 13y ago
Are you sure that wasn't intentional? In enterprise sales, it's fairly common to customize the demo to the client. I've been in situations where we deliberately made our software match the prospect's branding as closely as possible.

tokenadult 13y ago

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-legacy.pdf http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/files/246-dgb-uneasy-legac... http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30D16FF3B5B11738DDDAC0A94D9405B888DF1D3 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.

heyitsnick 13y ago
That's a great story about Nelotsky, I hadn't heard that before. For those interested, these fake entries to catch copyright infringement are commonly referred to as "Mountweazels". They are common in maps (fake towns, roads) and dictionaries (fake words and definitions). You can read more on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
- kstop 13y ago
  Also catching on in celebrity baby photos: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/kim-kardashian-plants-fake-baby-photos-weeds-out-greedy-friends-reports-say/article12824119/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/kim-karda...
  - hello_newman 13y ago
    Unbelievable. I have new found respect for Kim Kardashian. That was incredibly smart.
    - contacternst 13y ago
      You mean you didn't already have respect for Kim's contribution to protecting privacy on the internet?!
jere 13y ago
Like heyitsnick said, that sounds like trap streets and Esquivalience. The thing I always wondered is if these fictitious items weren't actually hurtful to the reputation of the company creating them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esquivalience http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esquivalience

jdmitch 13y ago

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

hiddenfeatures 13y ago
"These business men are here to tell you why you are going to break your leg tomorrow" - I love that :-)

glanotte 13y ago

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

OliC 13y ago

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.

grundprinzip 13y ago
It's an awesome eye-catcher, they should make a JQuery plugin (if it doesn't already exist). And the code is rather (minified) simple: https://gist.github.com/grundprinzip/5868304 https://gist.github.com/grundprinzip/5868304
- Killswitch 13y ago
  No need for a jQuery plugin, it's simple to do. I noticed it too and looked through their JS and found it to be way more complicated than it needs, using jQuery. http://jsfiddle.net/Killswitch/BSukL/show/ http://jsfiddle.net/Killswitch/BSukL/show/ Nothing on the page but the code, so open that in a new tab and swap tabs to see it in action.
bluetidepro 13y ago
I completely agree. It's awesome in theory, but I would hate this feature if tons of sites started using it. It could get out of hand very quickly.
- recursive 13y ago
  I don't know what theory it's awesome under, but I have to disagree with that. I want titles to describe the content of their page.
brokentone 13y ago
I didn't find it cute, but rather annoying.

jmduke 13y ago

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

pipecork 13y ago

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.

Samuel_Michon 13y ago
> Acting like a good sport with an even better sense of humor will win you many customers. I agree, they should’ve done that. As the post is now, I don’t feel it is especially funny and I don’t see them being a good sport either.
ciderpunx 13y ago
Not titling it with a split infinitive would have got my vote </pedantry>

Ygor 13y ago

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.

lighthazard 13y ago
Responding well to them? Their design is a standard template - slider below a menu, 3 columns below that, brands/testimonials below that, large footer. The only similarities I really see are the structure of the templates, and both look like they're from bootstrap, so I'm not sure what the stealing is complaining about.
- eyko 13y ago
  I was thinking the same until I saw the run through. It seems quite obvious that they copied, to the extent that even minor details are there. However, I still think that the design is a trend, and it's a common pattern that you'll find hundreds (thousands?) of sites follow, not to say copy. And it's obvious that Infinium did not come up with the style. I would like to see if they used similar CSS classes (which anyone probably can check in 5 minutes, but we can't be bothered... it's a common design pattern, yeah).
- mattmanser 13y ago
  I wonder if you're design blind? I've met a few people like that before. If that's all you think there is to a design, the 'standard' layout, you've missed a lot. Are you seriously going to tell me you can't see the similarity between: http://www.infinum.co/services http://www.infinum.co/services http://kintek.com.au/services/ http://kintek.com.au/services/ That most websites don't have that curve, or the spacing on the left/right or the little bar above the menu rather than below or any of the things that screams a rip? Then scroll down to the footer and they're identical. Go open any other software consultancy website and see if you can see those same similarities? There's so much more to a design than just the grid layout. I've seen this happen myself at a company I consulted for, they told the designer they wanted a website that looked like X's website, so the designer pretty much cloned the website, moved a couple of things around and changed the logo. Client thought it was wonderful. On a separate note, does anyone else find the indenting of the HTML on the infinum site to be very odd?

jgrahamc 13y ago

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.

danielweber 13y ago
I worked at a company where the competitor included our typos in their product. Good times, good times.
jevin 13y ago
Same experience here. The guy even hotlinked our Javascript files. Little did he know that we could have controlled his website from where we were.
- thejacenxpress 13y ago
  alert("we steal");
  - sneak 13y ago
    You only trigger the alert on 1% of page loads, otherwise they fix it quickly. ;D
euroclydon 13y ago
Boy-oh-boy I wish Google would lock analytics IDs down to a domain. Somebody in a university in Mexico City copied mine into a project they have in their www directory, and I just had to regex filter it out of GA.
- k__ 13y ago
  seems like the amount of people who do this is rather big. Google probably thinks it's a good way to track users of websites that aren't their customers :D
13y ago

bluetidepro 13y ago

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

kbojody 13y ago
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.infinum.co/the-capsized-eight/articles/how-to-properly-plagiarize-a-website http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
SpikedCola 13y ago
If you search Google for "cache:[interesting url]", it will take you directly to their cache for the page, if it exists

croisillon 13y ago

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

scottrogers86 13y ago

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

outworlder 13y ago
And why is that a problem? Isn't the whole idea of bootstrap to serve as a starting point?
- scottrogers86 13y ago
  It's not a problem. I'm just saying that Infinum seems to think they came up with a certain layout. When in reality, it just came from bootstrap.
mmuro 13y ago
This. Kintek was clearly inspired by what Infinum did, especially on some of the graphical elements. But they both appear, on a code level, to be Twitter Bootstrap. Infinum definitely needs to get over themselves.
ssharp 13y ago
Bootstrap provides a slim set of tools for constructing a website. The power comes in it's components, mobile-readiness, and extensibility. Going from default Bootstrap to either of these two sites would still take a lot of design work. You can also see the linked article's author talking about specific design decisions they made that aren't made by default Bootstrap. I think a more accurate critique would be to look at some of the templates on Wrap Bootstrap. A lot of them do similar things to both of these websites.
EthanEtienne 13y ago
Yea this is a very common design pattern.

mdip 13y ago

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.

dasil003 13y ago

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.

euxneks 13y ago
Did you guys write an article about that? That sounds supremely interesting.
- ChrisAntaki 13y ago
  Agreed, this speaks well to the frontend that was built.
- jkimmel 13y ago
  I too would love to see a write up of some sort. Now that, that sounds like flattery.
- gtd 13y ago
  We did not publicize it in any way because we are a legit film streaming company with hundreds of distributors worldwide, and no good can come from any awareness of a site that looks like ours streaming pirated content. Maybe some day.

gearoidoc 13y ago

I remember Davor Suker!

donretag 13y ago
Sukerman! Hrvatska's best world cup.

johndbritton 13y ago

> 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.

wwwarhawk 13y ago

This article smells like self importance.

MrBra 13y ago
Ok, share your hard drive with us, let us download something you've worked on for 6 months and then complain.

kamakazizuru 13y ago

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?

Udo 13y ago
You're not alone. In fact, at first I thought their sites were standard Wordpress templates. I was kind of surprised they actually built them by hand. They both consist solely of what I would consider standard elements and layouts.
- muloka 13y ago
  I am pretty certain that the Kintek website is a Wordpress site built using the Roots Starter Theme. Based on the fact they use: * Make use of both the Yoast SEO and Gravity Forms plugins, which are well known Wordpress plugins. * Twitter Bootstrap * Have an /assets/ folder which most likely rewrites to /wp-content/themes/themename/assets/ * Have a /plugins/ folder which most likely rewrites to /wp-content/plugins/
websitescenes 13y ago
Yes, I just posted the same sentiments before I saw your comment.
lawnchair_larry 13y ago
Yes
eranation 13y ago
Nope, I'm with you. I've seen much more obvious plagiarisms. Although it's obvious that Kintek were more than a little inspired by infinum, and indeed some items look copied as is except the color change, the rest looks like any other bootstrap / grid based marketing site template. They might have pushed the "inspiration" part to the limit, and might deserve the post for not being too original, but I'm sure you can find thousands of sites that have similar elements and statistically, some of them copied from someone else. And I'm sure infinium were also inspired (even subconsciously) from other designers. Almost every other site today has a dark header, a Mac screen / laptop carousel, slide scroll / parallax / infinite scrolling and a 3 column grid using the same icon fonts, dark 3 column footer with links, partners / as seen on techcrunch / customer logos in gray emboss. everyone has it. Although it's clear they copied, you could find sites that have these elements that didn't copy (or copied from someone else). So it's just the number of similar elements that is annoying, not each element individually IMHO.

DanBC 13y ago

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

yashodhan 13y ago

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.

gk1 13y ago
What? Are you saying they are arrogant for outing a plagiarizer?
- andrew_gardener 13y ago
  I think he's referring to how they are arrogant for threatening them, sending them "design tips", and playing themselves up as sexy and dangerous all in the same message. They definitely have a valid point about the plagiarism but they're being really cocky and showy about it. Edit: Ya, they might have been trying to be funny or venting, I can understand that. But they really shouldn't have ANY kind of physical threat in there at all. Its childish and just pointless posturing.
  - gk1 13y ago
    I thought they were just trying to be slightly funny.
  - euxneks 13y ago
    I think they are a bit angry and venting a bit..
- icco 13y ago
  I'm not sure about what OP was thinking, but I felt the same way. The article seemed to have mixed messages. One was, "how dare you steal from us" and the other was "Everyone steals". Looking at the two sites, they were both using such common web design styles these days, that I would have assumed they both based their site off of someone else's. If I were them, I would have stuck to the second argument, realized that no idea or design is a unique snowflake and everyone steals constantly.

chunsaker 13y ago

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

stordoff 13y ago

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

duncans 13y ago

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.

antitrust 13y ago

Both web sites look generic to me.

dustinfarris 13y ago

China does this all the time.

msie 13y ago
And so does the rest of the world. What's your point?

CodeMage 13y ago

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.

davorak 13y ago
> don't do this. Your message would probably come across clearer if you add a concrete example the behavior you want avoided and what you think the consequences are for not doing so.

kristianc 13y ago

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.

eli 13y ago

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.)

pestaa 13y ago
Autoplaying videos are fine, but... Comic Sans?! That's just evil. Good luck with the hosting company.

shelltreader 13y ago

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.

EthanEtienne 13y ago
I think I misread your comment, you wanted the article to be a how-to on how to plagiarize?

Samuel_Michon 13y ago

“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-borrow-great-poets-steal/ http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borro...

kenperkins 13y ago
This has been addressed on http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/ tl;dr: In conclusion, in 1892 an important precursor of this family of expressions was published. The author was W. H. Davenport Adams, and his words may have influenced the version that T. H. Eliot published in 1920.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  How delightfully meta.
  - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
    “How to properly plagiarize a quote”

spacecadet 13y ago

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

tmoertel 13y ago

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-steal.html http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2011-07-10-good-enough-to-stea...

snedzad 13y ago

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.

Tpsoc 13y ago

LOL...The irony. They wrote an article a in 2011 about plagerism. http://kintek.com.au/blog/web-design-plagerism-what-should-you-do-when-someone-steals-your-content/ http://kintek.com.au/blog/web-design-plagerism-what-should-y...

msantos 13y ago
Here a screenshot, just in case they decide to take that blog offline http://i.imgur.com/Duyq1N4.png http://i.imgur.com/Duyq1N4.png

Duhck 13y ago

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.

aaron695 13y ago

'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.

Smudge 13y ago

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.

wizardhat 13y ago

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.

timack 13y ago

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

donutdan4114 13y ago
The closest that post admits to anything is "We do agree that we have over-stepped the line of flattery vs plagiarism. Please give us time and we will try and rectify this as soon as we get a chance.". Everything else is kind of like.... No big deal. Egg in the face. Haha, we'll fix it. They should have just been more clear, like, "Yes, we pretty much copied your design. We love what you guys came up with. It was wrong of us to blatantly steal your perfectly crafted masterpiece, but we just couldn't help ourselves... We are inferior."

impresario 13y ago

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.

damian2000 13y ago

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.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]