Once, a few years ago, disassociated was completely stolen, or pirated. Everything was taken: the HTML, CSS, javascript, images; the lot.

A designer who happened to live in New Zealand thought that it might be easier just to take disassociated, apply one or two minor cosmetic changes, such as the name of the site, and call it his own work.

Yet it was this almost total and complete duplication that made the act all the more pathetic. The designer didn’t even bother changing the email addresses in the source code from mine to his!

When I contacted him about this he said he thought it was “ok” to take the design as it was an archived version of disassociated, and not the then current layout. Well it wasn’t really “ok” at all. If he (or anyone) had wanted to re-use any part of my website, he should have asked.

Then again you don’t receive too many requests from people asking to steal your work. Whatever, he promptly took the website down, and apologised. And Kudos to him for doing so.

This is a very familiar story though. Something similar recently unfolded at Airbag, the weblog of Greg Storey. Someone took the whole website, applied a few minor changes, and claimed the work to be their own.

The ruse was very quickly uncovered, which apparently came as something of a surprise to the thief. He wondered how he could have been caught out, and so soon. What technology had been used to find him, he wondered?

As mentioned several times in the discussion accompanying the Airbag post revealing the piracy, it didn’t matter how he had been uncovered. More the point he was found out. As stated in one comment, sooner or later “someone will notice”.

Needless to say, after a thorough bagging out from Greg and his readers, the offending duplicated website was taken off-line.