What to do When your Design is Stolen
It hasn’t happened to everyone, but it sure is prevalent on the net: ‘designers’ ripping off real designer’s website layouts, concepts, or sometimes even logos and actual content! I was reading elitebydesign’s post entitled “Getting Inspiration Wrong: Website Ripoffs” and noticed that nobody mentioned anything to do when your design is stolen.
While I’m no expert on the subject, I have been a web & graphic designer since 1998, and have seen myself and a few friends have to go through the following method in order to regain their credibility and original respect for their designs.
1. Just e-mail them. Chances are, a simple polite e-mail along the lines of ‘Hey, I noticed your design was quite similar to mine, I don’t know if you were trying to steal my design or be inspired by it, but maybe you could consider taking your design down or trying xx.” Granted, this won’t work for some, especially the ‘professional rippers’. But if it really is a fellow designer who didn’t realize how much he may have ‘borrowed’, giving them suggestions can make a world of difference, and it makes you look like the nice guy. However, when you’re dealing with the big boys, its time to move on to more powerful tactics.
2. Get the community behind you. Write a post on your blog or post an article about the perpetrating design and encourage people to e-mail the owner of the domain/rip with hate letters. This has proven to be about %85 effective for me and my associates, because even if they get new e-mail addresses, they’re easy to find. Once the offender’s inbox is assaulted, they are generally more likely to back down. Still putting up a fight? Move to step 3.
3. Hire an attorney and send the offender a phone call, an email, and snail mail with Cease & Desist notices from your attorney. Just threaten legal action; even if you don’t have the means to on your own, it should scare the ripper into backing down. If your community helped you with e-mailing him, he knows that (a) you have a lot of people behind you and (b) you are taking the time and trouble to let the world know what’s going on.
Granted, this isn’t foolproof. And if the offender won’t back down, then its up to you whether or not to make it a legal battle - I have seen several times, however, that communities will back up the real designer financially, emotionally, and in other ways to overcome a perpetrator.
What does everyone think? Any ideas on a better way?
It’s nice to see others sharing info that can help if this happens. Often in those times, the emotion can be overwhelming, and keep you from being able to react calmly or collectedly, or to even be coherent enough to know what to do. Let alone where to start. Good lookin’ out! Nice to know others still care.
Having gone through this myself, I know the frustrations that it entails. One ripper actually took it down then tried reposting it under a different directory.. even went to the lengths of stealing my resume I had plus taking credit for everything in my portfolio. A couple of threatening emails and exposure to the community helped out in this case.
One thing to remember for actual legal action is that you must have a certified copyright for your site. Because the Internet is a federal issue you can’t just take these cases to small claims court apparently. Everything you create is technically yours and you own that copyright but no judge will hear your case unless you have the required documentation of those copyrights. If a case does arise and you need to get those papers in order, you do have 90 days from the time of the infraction to file for the copyright and bring that in front of the judge.. This explains it a lot better.. although most of the interview is talking about photographs.. he does go into detail about copyright infringement cases.
http://www.layersmagazine.com/interview-with-copyright-attorney-ed-greenberg.html