Artists Steal

10 December, 2016

Toward the end of the One Page Many, someone really wanted to copy our main page and wrote about it on a russian dev forum. According to the author, I’m «seem to be dead» which means that they can steal my design. But the rumors about my death were somewhat exaggerated.

mahnevmaxim m
All we do is… (copy other people's stuff)…maybe it would be right to reach the author, but I don't see anything wrong with copying it.

Fedor92
That's the thing to reach the author....
When you develop your own sites and spend your personal time — the time of your personal life to develop, and the next day all your work will be copied by people who do not know how to develop anything and do not want — then you will remember my admonitions and the fact that you have IP rights.

mahnevmaxim m
The owner must be dead. What are we gonna do?
To make you feel better, I need only animation, is that okay? The author seems dead.

magirus
Come when the copyright expires. Domain registration period is not an indicator.

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This is not the first case. For example, in 2014 I found a task on freelance which author wrote «Need to code some design templates. I don’t have a .psd, but jpeg file». This file was a rip off from one of my prevous projects, obviously from another client. The left one is the original:

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UPD 2020

In 2020 I found a «designer», Nikita Titov, who just took my project (name, texts, icons, GUI mockup & overall style) and made somewhat look alike with many mistakes here and there. The left one is mine:

— How did you found it? — you may ask. Well, he wrote to me on Behance by himself!

Nikita Titov
— This project of yours could be packaged much more interestingly! If it is mobile application screens — at least as an option — could be shown as a mockup.

Then we had a short dialogue about it:

Me
— Nikita, have you stopped stealing other people’s designs? It's better to make your own. Good luck.

Nikita Titov
— Yes, I've stopped stealing! I'm tired of it. I've been busy animating layouts for a while now.

…But nothing changed — ripped off version is still in his profile.

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All of that made me laugh out of loud. Honestly, my work has been copied so many times that I don't count those cases anymore. I'm not sorry or angry: it just means that I was doing my job well even many years ago.

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