Any suggestions on how to prevent our client getting ripped off?
by Fred Roed on 12/11/07 at 1:02 pm
3 comments
My company, World Wide Creative, manages a very profitable website that has just been brutally savaged by a rogue rip-off designer in Germany. I wrote about it on The Heavy Chef blog as well, and our client is now asking what kind of recourse can be taken. Short of writing them a nasty letter (or hacking into their site), any advice?
World Wide Creative’s client:
The David Hasselhof version:
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. Fred is the CEO of web marketing company World Wide Creative and the co-founder of online learning portal Heavy Chef. Fred loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. Follow Fred on Twitter here. View more articles by Fred Roed.
Andrew
Nov 12th, 2007
I’ve just looked at the copycat site in Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer and it looks like the cloned header image has been modified to remove the Kudu (2007-11-12 20:45). All things considered, I feel that it would be a waste to really pursue this one.
The site isn’t properly hosted – it’s just a frameset onto a Geocities page, the HTML is well beyond horrific (BAD GENERATOR!) furthermore, it feels far more like an instance of “I want my site to look like their site, but I don’t know how to do it properly”. Added to the really old fashioned overlay adverts that Geocities embeds into everything, it just looks tragic.
I hope I’m not being to blasé about this, but the only reason that I can see to be pissed off at this is because it such a bad rip off.
Now if they had been embedding images from your site design into their own (i.e. the really stupid way to rip off another site because they’ll be giving away the HTTP_REFERER), then I would have happily provided you with a few .htaccess rewrite rules to push anyone visiting their site into a more disturbing part of the internet.
Fred
Nov 12th, 2007
Cheers Andrew, good point. Weirdly enough this is the tenth or eleventh time this particular site has been ripped off in some way or another. Our client is fairly irate, particularly because they paid us to put watermarks on all their images after 2 years of people copying their stuff (the site’s around 4 yrs old now). This guy, the German site, has actually taken the time and effort of using Photoshop to remove watermarks. Somehow, you have to admire the brazenness.
Ivolution-seo
Nov 13th, 2007
Yeah it’s a pity that people cannot come up with their own original content. Unfortunately it’s the way th web has gone for the last couple of years.
What irritates me though is this guy new what he was doing, so it’s not like he’s even a beginner.
HACK IM!