How our website was stolen

Aleksandra Puchta-Górska

03 Sep 2013.1 minute read

We are eager to share this story because it seems to be a popular procedure, and we would like to warn others but also gather ways of dealing with such a situation. Here is what happened and how we reacted.

A few weeks ago we found out that each and every pixel of our site had been copied, together with our bios, without even the basic facts about the company having been changed.

The company that did this is called F’ed Up (twitter.com/fed21up). What they do is copy websites featured on Awwwards every few days. That way ‘their’ pages are getting awarded and they get nice traffic.

To get a sense of the extent of this copy&paste practice check out the screenshot of their website:

Copycat of SoftwareMill's website

And compare them with our site: softwaremill.com

Actually, you can still see one of the copied pages live: fedup.in/team

So here is what we did after finding out that our web layout had been stolen:

1. As the images were hotlinked from our site, we prepared a pop-up appearing on their site saying that the site is a copycat. The pop-ups could not be seen by them.

2. We prepared a demotivator-style campaign for social media showing the results of copying&pasting the whole website without even changing the content.

SoftwareMill's demotivator

3. We contacted them via e-mail claiming the rights to the design and threatening that unless they stop using it we would undertake serious steps.

3. We contacted their host provider, but there were so many formal documents required that we decided not to go through with it.

4. We wrote to the Polish embassy in New Delhi, which
helped us by writing an official e-mail to them. We also wrote to Indian embassy in Poland – no answer so far.

After copying our website, they copied two others within a few days. We informed those companies about it. We also wrote to Awwwards to warn them about such practices.

We are eager to learn what other ways of dealing with such a situation there are. Have you experienced something similar?
What did you do?

A big thanks to Roy from Zwaarcontrast – for informing us about what was going on.

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