bitextender.com gets photocopied, in color!
This afternoon I received the following e-mail (names redacted to protect the, uhm, innocent):
Subject: Salam
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2010 15:19:26 +0100
From: "Friend of Copycat" <jinx@saipem.eni.it>
To: <hello@bitextender.com>
Cc: <copycat@iqrasoftcomputers.com>
I was about to hit the “Junk Mail” button when I realized that the included screenshot resembled the “contact” page on bitextender.com. Then I looked at the list of recipients. Then I started laughing.
It turns out that the guy running iqrasoftcomputers.com (I’ll refer to him as Copycat) made his website a near-identical copy of bitextender.com in terms of design, look-and-feel, color schemes, even all the source code including comments and file names (except, of course, for the HTML adjustments made in some places to insert different text).
And because that wasn’t bad enough yet, he crippled the navigation bar with a language selector and dug up one of the worst pieces of Internet history, a hit counter, and put it in the footer of the page:
And then a friend or colleague sent him feedback in form of a screenshot, pointing out an error, and also put our hello@bitextender.com on the list of recipients, for reasons that, no matter how hard I try, still elude me.
So I decided to send a reply to the Copycat (putting his friend who sent us the original message on CC so he would know his misfortune):
Subject: Re: Salam
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:20:21 +0200
From: "David Zülke" <david.zuelke@bitextender.com>
To: <copycat@iqrasoftcomputers.com>
Cc: "Friend of Copycat" <mishap@saipem.eni.it>, …
Dear Mr. Copycat,
Since your friend made the unfortunate mistake of CC-ing the e-mail below to hello@bitextender.com (a lapse I cannot help but chuckle at), the fact that your website http://iqrasoftcomputers.com is a blatant, 1:1 rip-off of our website, http://www.bitextender.com, has come to my attention and ruined my peaceful Sunday afternoon.
Not only have you directly copied the entire design and look and feel as well as the HTML, CSS and JavaScript source code (including comments and file names) of our website and color scheme of our corporate identity. You weren’t even creative enough to come up with your own texts for some of the pages.
Since your company is based in a European country whose legal system satisfies certain minimum standards the modern Western world so cherishes, I am sure you are familiar with the term “copyright law”. If not, let me help you with the following analogy: it is a very big hammer, pointy at one end, that we will hit you with if you do not take your website in its current form offline by Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 12:00 Central European Time.
Make no mistake, we are both based in the EU. Legal proceedings against you will be quick and painful. We have conclusive evidence that easily proves your infringement of our intellectual property and that of the graphics designer we hired to build our website. In the unfortunate event that we find you left the website online beyond the aforementioned deadline, we shall have to place this matter in the hands of our lawyers.
Sincerely,
David Zülke
P.S: The graphics designer wo built our website would like you to know that not only does he feel rather offended that you would take a 1998-style hit counter and put it at the bottom of the page, but also that he is considering legal action of his own against you. He may choose to contact you in separate correspondence. I’ve put him on CC as well for his reference so he can follow up with you.
On 18.04.2010, at 16:19, Friend of Copycat wrote:
…
I’m curious what the response will be…
Updates:
- @muhdiekuh found out that the e-mail link on their contact page points to hello@bitextender.com. That would explain why we got the e-mail :)
- Shoan says they used httrack to leech the entire site.
