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Portfolio rip-off

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by ditt0bx

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Some days ago while doing my weekly research on my webdesign portfolio stats I discovered that I got ripped off by a Turkish company.
They never bothered even to change the screenshots of the sites in my portfolio.they.just changed the text in the html and put their name over mine in the graphics. They changed the title in the meta, but not my name..so I'm still the author there. Not to mention the css wich is still named the way I named it and the comments in the css are still my own.
After posting this to another forum, a member of that forum discovered that the Turkish company copied also a previous version of my portfolio.
I tried to e-mail them to the addresses provided on their sites and to the addresses in the registrar's records, asking them to kindly remove the designs that they stole from me, but no reply came. I have sent e-mails to the hosting companies (one of them is also Turkish, the other one seems to be a phantom company somewhere in the US), but no reply came as well.
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post links here, so I won't for the time being. What I want is some advice: what can I do? Is there any way that I can solve this?

9 replies

by jaqui

pay attention if you had them facing copyright lawsuit.

If you saved copies of the emails you sent, then I would take printouts to your lawyer and get a letter sent through their office, stating removal, or licensing payment and damages payment [ explicit amounts ] with a due date. if not in compliance by then, file the lawsuit.

by hillbilly tech

Keeping copies & Records Is a good Idea. The trouble with this is that it is in another country witch has diffrent rules & regulations. I would check with a lawyer to see what can be done. Either to receive payment for this or to have it removed. Wouldn't want to spend alot of money on lawyers & at the end still nothing. Good luck.

by bblackmoor

On the one hand, there is literally nothing that you can do to prevent people from copying your work, and any attempt on your part to prevent it is just time wasted that should have been spent on doing something productive. So don't worry about it.

On the other hand, the people who copied your work sound like utter incompetents, so it's unlikely that, even if you do have clients in Turkey, you will probably have no trouble competing with this company for work.

There is a trend in today's society to try and control everything we create after we have created it. That vain attempt to control everything causes a great deal more harm than good (e.g., RIAA, MPAA, DMCA, etc.). My advice is to let it go, and not to worry about it.

by ewingdweller

You are correct that there are several ways for people to collect your images and coding.

Using the File / Save Page As... (or similar) will aloow a user to save all of the content from your web page(s). I do remember one web cam site which used code so that a right-click Save Image As... of the displayed image just saved a precanned image with the web site name and a copyright message.

So, although there are ways of blocking their efforts, I agree their incompetance will likely prevent them from getting too far. The letter from your lawyer may get some results.

Best of Luck!

by greg

Be glad that your shhhytt is good enough people would want to mock.

and move on! dont waste time sending emails!

Let that site stay up so when you are pitching to new cliuents you can showcase it! "See were so good people cant keep their hands off our designs!"

by daveaaaaaa13

Same thing happened to my website at www.whatsthebigidea.com several years ago. They never even bothered to change meta tags. So, I did a whois and then sent letters to everyone listed as well as their Web host with a cease and desist message. Within hours the site came down and I received an apology from a represntative from the Singapore company. They explained that an employee had ripped the site unbenost to the company principals. Good luck.

by bblackmoor

See? This is exactly what I'm talking about about when I say that trying to control what you *can't* control winds up doing more harm than good.

If you try to "disable right-click" using JavaScript, you will just waste your time, add complexity to your work for no reason, make your page more fragile, interfere with your visitor's ability to use *their* web browser, and after all of that you have still accomplished *nothing*, because circumventing this pitiful, misguided attempt to control the visitor's ability to right-click is as easy as checking a checkbox in the browser settings that says "do not allow the page to disable the mouse's right-click" (in Firefox), or simply disabling JavaScript altogether (in older, less capable browsers like IE).

It is a waste of time and energy, and all it will accomplish is to irritate people who want to view your work -- and isn't that why you put your work online in the first place, so people *can* view it? The only thing this so-called "disable right-click" idiocy accomplishes is to make the web designer look childish and -- what's worse -- incompetent. Any competent web designer knows that it's a bad idea to interfere with the user's web browser, and every competent JavaScript programmer knows that it is IMPOSSIBLE to prevent a user from right-clicking.

Don't waste your time and your visitor's good will on trying to control what can not be controlled. Focus on doing your job *well*.

by rickthewebguy

You may be able to actually use this situation to benefit your clients. If the portfolio they ripped off from you still has links to your client's sites intact then that is an extra backlink towards google's pagerank system. It is only one more link, but that one link may make the difference in stepping up to the next pagerank level. Be careful in posting any links to the portfolio thief. Even though you probably want to expose him and let the world know how low he really is, it may back fire and give him a bucket full of new backlinks that may make his rip-off more popular in the search engines than your original work. It is people like this that can give our community of skilled developers a bad name so let's do everything we can to not promote them.

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