When something is this blatantly ripped off, it’s hard not to notice. First look at Visit Philly’s site, launched several months ago, and then look at Catholic Online’s site, just launched.
Not only do the visuals appear to have been stolen and re-purposed, so does the actual code. If you dig around in the catholiconline.org site you can find references to philly and visitphilly, along with identical naming schemes. The city of Philadelphia paid good money for their wonderful new Website, created by Happy Cog, a highly regarded web design agency with offices in Philly, NY and CA. The site launched several months ago, and has been getting great reviews, as most of Happy Cog’s projects garner for themselves and their clients.
Then along comes Catholiconline.org, and while we have yet to determine if they hired some outside company to create their site or tasked an internal team with it (they aren’t responding to comments on Twitter), one thing is clear…their team stole work, ideas, designs and code that were not their own, and created catholiconline.org. While I don’t know the legal ramifications or remedies for this kind of situation (and if you do please share in the comments), I do know that this does not shine a favorable light on catholiconline.org. What do you think? Is this blatant to a non-designer’s eye? Is this kind of stealing acceptable when it comes to Websites? Should someone be held accountable?
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Yikes. They didn’t even steal it well. What small changes they did make to the VisitPhilly site look terrible. On the upside, they stole from a great source (that isn’t meant to condone the theft in any way, mind you).
Also interesting: their copyright statement is laughable now.