Once again, only sixteen months after the last case, we’re faced with another website looking very familiar to our own.

This time, however, it only took 32 minutes from the legal letter being received, for the offending website to revert to a Coming Soon screen. Perhaps they heard about our last case, and how it ended up settling out of court?

Maybe the designer hadn’t read my previous post about the Basics of Copyright, however that’s no excuse. In this case it’s just laziness and a lack of ethics.

I’m being gentle here. I think it’s more a case of theft of our hard work and efforts and dilution of what makes our website different (especially since a competitor web company pointed it out to us). I’m being so gentle, that I’m not even linking to the offending website yet, and I am reasonably sure the grabs above aren’t enough to give it away.

So, why be gentle at all? Well, the fact is the client may have made the reasonable assumption that they had engaged a professional web company. By outing the website in question, all I am doing is pointing the finger at the client and not their supplier(s).

It doesn’t help that their web company has let their hosting lapse, so I can’t link to them. However, I will await feedback from the client, and will let you know in due course.

A spokesperson for the web company are saying that they were just ‘handed a design’, so where does the fault lie? Certainly not the client, it’s not their responsibility to visit every page on the internet to ensure it doesn’t match anyone else’s, however things certainly become less obvious when we look at the web company.

The supplier to the client, in this case a web company, has a duty of care that they’ve made sure all their designers, contractor or not, have a reasonable understanding of what design theft is and isn’t, and that they ensure they only employ designers with a reasonable professional understanding.

So, what could a client do? I’d suggest asking that all contracts state that the suppliers have taken all reasonable precaution to ensure that all imagery, photography and design elements are properly licensed. They could ask to see these licenses (a big ask), or indeed ask if the web company has professional indemnity insurance, and if so, does it cover copyright infringements.

Meg over at Blogpond has a great post about Blogging and Plagiarism, which is also worth a read.

I’ll let you know the outcomes of this case over the coming weeks.

Image: Screengrabs from Bam Creative website and similar designed site.

Looking at a few previous posts (such as Most Viewed Posts of 2006 and Placing Value on your Blog), I would forgive you if you started to think I was fascinated by blogging, and by the inherent ‘is this blog interesting to people?’ thought process I’m sure every blogger has.

As a matter of course for the first few months I used to regularly trawl my blog statistics package, looking for an insight into who reads which posts and when, what posts capture interest, and which don’t. However that quickly wore off, and it’s rare I even check them out at all.

However, back in my Placing Value post, I talked about using comments as a form of measurement tool. So, it won’t come as a surprise to you that I recently started to wonder which of my posts have garnered more comments than others in the last two years of blogging…

So here it is; the top nine posts (who needs 10?), using comments as a measurement:

1. The Web 2.0 Secret Weapon was my very successful tongue in cheek look at the Web2.0 phenomenon, including Photoshop Palette.

2. Job applicants take note was a rant of mine after a recruiting campaign, at the lack of care applicants put into finding that job.

3. If Web2.0 applied to cars was another joke based around Web2.0 - get the feeling I liked to knock that trend?

4. An Absolute Honour, a recent post about my own personal achievement in winning a business award.

5. 39 hints when looking for web industry work allowed me to cover what I consider to be the basics when applying for a position at a web company.

6. Lets use English in HTML was another rant, albeit with the intention of encouraging debate, about the usage of American English spelling in HTML.

7. Make Money Blogging was a discussion around what methods bloggers go to, in order to earn a buck.

8. Design Thieves Part II was a rant about an unfortunate incident back mid last year, when we had a website completely copied. It eventually settled out of court, in our favour.

9. Well explained forms was a chance for me to get on a soapbox about a form I had encountered, and what was blatantly wrong with it.

Now, I need to start re-thinking my strategy. They say you’re meant to pick a niche, and stick to it - I certainly never heeded that advice with the above posts, nor with the other 130 or so. The above nine posts cover one huge range of subjects, albeit with some vaguely similar themes around recruitment and web2.0.

Image: Grapes in our backyard.