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Hmmm…

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s people who steal my designs. I don’t mind so much if my site ‘inspires’ people, but downright theft I really dislike.

I was scrolling through my server logs this morning, clicking on links to any of the incoming domains I didn’t recognise when suddenly something very familiar popped up.

Isn’t that… no. That can’t be my photo. Hang on, isn’t that my menu, too, and my layout and my nameplate. It was the whole top section of my site, copied and transplanted on someone else’s site. Rather stupidly, the guy who had done it hadn’t even changed all the links on the menu so when you clicked on ‘about’ it sent you straight back to my site, rather giving the game away.

It’s the second time it’s happened in six months, the last time being some guy in Norfolk taking my old design. Back then I consulted Roger, who still carries around his bar council card (or whatever it is) to see what my rights are. Fortunately he agreed that it constitutes copyright theft and passing off, and a swift email to that effect, both then and today, saw the sites disappear within five minutes.

I get really annoyed when that happens, but it’s given me an idea. I’ve decided to design some shells of sites - layouts that I won’t actually use myself, but will put on my site so that they can be downloaded and used by anyone who doesn’t want to design their own. Kind of like the templates you get bundled with web design software, complete with style sheets and images.

A medium-term plan. Hopefully it will make nicking the current design less appealing.

Bought a very interesting book at lunchtime: “Great Railway Journeys of Europe“. Amazon seems to think it’s not available yet but I found it in the British Airways travel shop on Regents Street. It’s giving me very itchy feet, in particular to follow a fantastic route it described from Paris to Moscow by way of Brussels, Berlin, Warsaw and Minsk.

As you pass out of Poland and into Belarus at Brest they apparently change the wheels of the train. The Russians, it says, always feared that a Western army would try to invade by way of the railways. To slow them down they built their tracks using a wider gauge. The armies would be forced to stop because their trains would not fit and the invasion would be stopped in its tracks… so to speak.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 29th, 2002 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.