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Valley VC Firm Steals Flock's Site Design
businesslogs.com — Next Internet is a new Silicon Valley incubator that's planning to launch 15 dotcom companies in the next 3 years. They're well-funded and are looking to hire a bunch of new developers....... buuuuut they stole Flock.com's HTML and CSS. Probably the worst rip I've ever seen!
DJSdotcom- 619 diggs
- digg it
- itsenbay, on 10/12/2007, -40/+4I hate flock. Maybe something good will come of this.
- netwookiee, on 10/12/2007, -19/+1...
- nahdan, on 10/12/2007, -14/+4this doesn't really look like flock's site to me.
- Buttercup, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15Read the article, it shows screenshots of the NextInternet site, and the flock site.
obviously NextInternet quickly changed their site.
- Buttercup, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15Read the article, it shows screenshots of the NextInternet site, and the flock site.
- Ghazi, on 10/12/2007, -20/+5Now why do we care?
- noneloud, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Wow, they switched back quick.
http://www.nextinternet.com/- noneloud, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14Actually, now that I think of it, maybe the whole thing is just to get people to go to that website....subliminal spam? Who knows?
- TheFlyingMonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The digg effect strikes with blinding fury.
- ChrisJ, on 10/12/2007, -15/+7@Ghazi I concur, if people want the latest on stolen site designs, then they should go to www.pirated-sites.com
This really doesn't belong on the frontpage, and I'd question if it belongs on Digg at all.- l0ne, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14Well, it _is_ tech news, and a bunch o' geeks found this worth of diggin', so it belongs on digg :D
- w0rd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Perhaps you should go back to Slashdot and score some Karma so we don't have to listen to your whining about something many of us are obviously interested in.
- hacx2k6, on 10/12/2007, -13/+0Talking of doing a design, there are lots of free web templates on the net and i dont know how one can even think of stealing others design when he can easily download a site template in seconds, me doing it for years on all my sites:
http://soft.hacx.org
http://news.hacx.org
http://gta.hacx.org
http://www.hacx.org - postlogic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Haha, looks like they changed it really quick, too. This probably took them about 3 seconds longer than the rip.
- bharder, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It's possible if the site is in development they just used the design to get the creative juices flowing, but if the site was live then that's fked up.
- ockabewis, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4They definitely changed it in a hurry!
- mikejohnston, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1I don't know if I'd call the flock site a "design" exactly-- mostly font choices and margins; however... "according to the screenshots" it appears to be an exact copy. Has there ever been a case of someone "creating a screenshot" to make someone look bad because the company would not fund them? Just curious?
- rabiddogma, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Ummm I'd like to know what your definition of design is if it doesn't include font choices and margins.
- w0rd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Ummm I'd like to know what your definition of design is if it doesn't include font choices and margins."
I'll second that as well as throwing a RTFA your way. It has a link to the google cache.
- wolfzero, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:hvGj5gqe06UJ:www.nextinternet.com/+&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1
Google's cache has it. The link article's image of the two pages was so similar I didn't realize it was two different websites, this might help set things straight. - SolariPicasso, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2They also don't have very good proof-readers working on their team, here is a quote, "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." -Wiston Churchill, love that spelling of Winston Churchill. http://www.nextinternet.com/jobs.html
- mckinnej, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Maybe he was Winston's cousin...
- SolariPicasso, on 10/12/2007, -0/+20Also the Style sheets are still there. http://www.nextinternet.com/img/utility.css
Check out the stylesheet particulars:
/**
* -----------------------------------------------
* Flock utility styles
* -----------------------------------------------
*
* This stylesheet provides basic, generic styles
* that can be used in across Flock sites.
*
* Many classes have two names to make them easier
* to remember.
*
*/- kilps, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Thats what I call blatently stupid ...
- charbarred, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13Why steal such a horrible design?
- Stockwell, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1Let's wait for the Bubble to burst.
Dot crash pt2 coming to theaters near you soon. - tinus, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Down! Another victim of Google Analytics server problems.
See: http://digg.com/search?search=analytics&submit=Submit - SolariPicasso, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Yet another way to view the blatant rip, http://www.nextinternet.com/img/
Funny, I don't know if it's illegal to do this. I know I have done it just to get some basic styles. Not on a actual public site, just to see how stuff is done...- Gnascher, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It's illegal because it is copyright infringement.
From Flock's footer:
"All this, copyright © Flock except where otherwise noted, from now to infinity."
But if it weren't illegal, it'd still be immoral since you are taking someone else's work and presenting it as your own.
I saw this article when it first hit the queue, and there is no doubt it was a direct rip. Previous posters who have found the stylesheet still on thier servers with reference to Flock inside prove the truth of the matter.
Additionally, the site that's up there now is a very generic template probably taken directly from one of the template generators out there. Not illegal or immoral anymore, just lazy. - rabiddogma, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I's a copyright violation for sure.
They probably haven't hired a designer, so they're cheap as well as lazy. - drbhoneydew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1From Flock's meta tags: (c) Copyleft 2005 Christopher Messina
From Flock's footer: "All this, copyright © Flock except where otherwise noted, from now to infinity."
Would the meta tag count as where otherwise noted?
- Gnascher, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It's illegal because it is copyright infringement.
- rsh28630, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3If Next Internet has so little regard for intellectual property and creativity that they plagiarize someone else's code and represent it as their own, there is nothing new about Next Internet's business model.
"Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."
According to their hype: "Most of our companies are based on ideas we generate internally, although from time to time we consider ideas brought to us by other entrepreneurs or acquire interests in existing Internet companies."
They should add... "Of course, when we have no ideas whatsoever, we blatantly rip off and are so inept we don't even know how disguise the theft nor apologize when we are caught."
Redefining web incubator... 'said the spider to the fly'. - nintom, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:hvGj5gqe06UJ:www.nextinternet.com/ nextinternet&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2
here is the google cache page!
seems real to me. I agree with whomever said it was changed very fast and the 'new design' is horrible. - munkt0n, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5fools, the flock layout sucks, why copy it?
- sanjay, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1Flock who?
or is it a what?- enderu, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2It's an open source web browser.
- villemba, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1What a bunch of aholes. Anyone with half a braincell would realize that stealing the layout of such a high profile site when you are a VC group that is going to launch a bunch of dotcoms is ridiculous. At least rename the classes. Idiots.
- bytefoo, on 10/12/2007, -6/+3High profile? I doubt 95% of VC groups knows or cares about Flock. Flock is pretty much a failure as it is. Besides...
IT'S A ***** WEBPAGE. GET OVER IT.
- bytefoo, on 10/12/2007, -6/+3High profile? I doubt 95% of VC groups knows or cares about Flock. Flock is pretty much a failure as it is. Besides...
- Whifflepuff, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1I am asking this honestly, Why is this a problem? If this is bad, why is open source good?
- Hungryhaney, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Because plagiarism is NOT what open source is all about. They took the code without even mentioning the site design was taken from Flock.
- openedsource, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The U.N. often provides food to impoverished countries. Shops often provide free samples of edible items. If I cook up something good, I'll share it with friends. Hell, I might even share the recipe.
None of those justifies me walking into a store and stealing food off the shelves. - Whifflepuff, on 10/12/2007, -5/+0I just think that today's Open Source concept resulted after a bunch of lawyers got a hold of it. I am not an anarchist or anything, I just think "So what?" It is hard to belive that Flock's cheesy web design has anyhting to do with how much they profit (or don't). So in that case, what is the big deal? It's not Pepsi is stealing Coke's secret recipe.
- Madh2orat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If theyre going to copy -cough- steal-cough- a css sheet, at least do it right and get rid of the tell-tale signs that its not yours. If your going to plagiarise, at least do it right, remove all refrences so it cant be tracked.
- netwookiee, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2This is ridiculous. Sounds like a 3 year old tattling on someone. "Daddy, Next Internet stole Flock's web siiitte!" Waa. waa. waa. Flock's website is fairly basic anyway. It's not like they stole much. Besides, most of these web 2.0 websites look alike anywhere. soo what's the diff, Biff!?
Apparently, They heard about it too because Next Internet has changed the layout. - DJSdotcom, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Netwookie: Stealing the code (blatant copy and pasting) is copyright infringement. Not only did they steal the look and feel, they just copied the design right over to their site. That's the difference.
- Whifflepuff, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1All this, copyright © Flock except where otherwise noted, from now to infinity.
- EnsErmac, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2They both need to hire a graphic designer, If you are going to steal something, why not steal something worth a crap.
- Windsinger, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Agreed. Minimalistic design !== excellence or utilitarian. The design fails at both.
- kernower, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2That's what I though when the read the title of the story on digg. Who in the right mind would actively want there site to look like flock's.
They would have got a nicer looking site if they had gone to one of the thousands of free template sites.
- Whifflepuff, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Why hasn't Tim Berners-Lee sued everyone? :)
- rekka, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3If they can't reproduce the considerably less than complex flock design without stealing everything, then I think there is something seriously wrong.
- lombarke, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2this has got to be a post to get people to pay attention to flock...because really, why would anyone give a ***** about them in the first place?
- bigdaddyrex, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I like the new gray scheme better.
- tmcpheeters, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2that was a pretty quick/crappy site redesign... quick, take it down and make it look bad!!! :)
- dmh2000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Its a left-handed tribute to CSS that they could switch looks so quickly.
- saigumi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I love how people defend theft like this with ignorance. I guess they are too busy stealing songs off of Kazaa to give any thought to it.
Anyhow, for you, I have written "The Dav Vinci Code" by Saigumi. It's identical to Dan Brown's book by the same name, but I crossed out his and put mine there meaning that I have the right to use it because if he didn't want anyone to use it, he wouldn't have published it. - DJSdotcom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1dmh: The new Next Internet site is all tables :)
- equusdc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Okay, so a lame pretender company "stole" a css sheet from another lame, failing company. There's basically no content on EITHER site, both of which look like someone's Web Design 101 homework from 1996. Who cares?
Sounds to me like someone has a grudge against someone in the offending company and wants to poke at them. Since the offices are all of a mile from each other, this seems like a lame fratboy cockfight a la "Dude, you're lame. No, dude, YOU'RE lame...No, dudes, you're both lame."
Rinse, repeat. - RyeBrye, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I think people are confusing Digg.com's viewers with the mafia connections they always wish they had. Digg.com users aren't going to go "rough somebody up" for you. Get over it.
- deleteYourslf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Well it's settled then, both designs equally suck
- webdevil, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"steal one of the most well-known web 2.0 designs out there"
Flock.com is a simple and well laid out site but by no means would I call it "well-known" or great for that matter. It's a blue bar with text! And yes the guy did rip flock.com off and that's bad but flock isn't that great of a site either.- DJSdotcom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I wouldn't say it's the best design, but Flock really is one of the most well-known "web 2.0" companies.
- actionjackson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0If stealing a mediocre design did not do enough to call this firm's competency into question, just look at their "jobs" page where they offer a quote from the venerable "Wiston Churchill."
WTF?
It becomes abundantly clear from this that not much effort, thought and certainly not QC, has gone into this company's website. Not encouraging for a company focused on making money from the Internet. - bazilio, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I think now the only thing left to do is go down to nextinternet hq and tell them how we feel about their actions. But if tomorrow they funded my project with a couple of mil I would not care.
- w0rd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0That's one of the worst rips I've ever seen.
- allanpat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Not to defend what they did at all, i think it's pretty lame. However, as a web designer who's been in the corporate world for a while now, here's how the business world works. Someone starts with an idea - they then get funding - they then look at their competitors to try to be at least on the same level as them.
I guarantee what happened was, Next Internet isn't even at the stage where they have a design team yet. They needed a website up asap, the CEO said 'make it look like our competitor Flock', so the person responsible (who probably doesnt know the first thing about web design or coding) simply stole their source code & changed the text.
I guarantee this was intended as a temporary site until they got a real web team in place, but still, it's pretty damned stupid & they deserve to get sued if it comes to that. I mean hell, if the guy knew the slightest thing about css, html, or design, he would have at least taken off the Flock copyrights from the code.....- TheFlyingMonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1So true, I've been a designer for a over a decade and I've seen so much worse.
- emstack, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1One problem, Flock, an open source web browser project, is hardly a competitor of Next Internet, a VC firm.
- wilfordbrimley, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0funny...
http://www.nextinternet.com/jobs/Web_Developer_20060202.html - TheFlyingMonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm sorry but Flock's website isn't what I would call "reality altering design." You've got a blue bar and the same font. -digg (lame)
- lordatlas, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'm still trying to figure out what's more lame: a pretty basic web site design that's essentially a blue bar on top with some text (Flock) - not exactly much by way of "design", or some company actually being so designer-challenged that they had to steal *that*.
This isn't really worthy of a Digg story.
(PS: Perhaps we should add the ability to "no digg" to counteract the "digg" feature?) - actionjackson, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I don't mean to be combative (merely observantly critical) but I feel there are a large number of diggers that continue to misconstrue the purpose, and the beauty of a social site like digg. Being 3 years old, does not preclude a story from being dugg, a story where the topic is of suspect credibility should not be excluded from digg. Indeed, what gets dugg is...for lack of a better metaphor... what gets dugg. In other words, enough people found it interesting to propel the story to the front. And this enables even more people who might also find it interesting to have easy access to it where they otherwise would not. This means that neither you, nor I, nor anyone else has the ability to decide what's "news", what's important, or what's interesting for everyone else. This is in stark contrast to traditional news sites and what makes digg so much more appealing (for me at least).
If you don't digg a story.....don't digg it! Digg? - kickarse, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1these people make me sick
- MrHomeValueCom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I sent them a few e-mails letting them know how I felt :)
- Phisolo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1What web developer has not "borrowed" the look and feel from another site? Back when I worked a a big web dev. company EVERY client came in saying "I want my site to be like..." If we did not blatantly rip off site X, the client was pissed. Such is the web.
With how simple this site looked, the owners probably never knew that their web designer blatantly ripped off someone else, or if they did they probably assumed that they ripped off the "design style", not the code itself.
The old web adage never re-do what has already been done. This applies to all coders. When a client asks for something you have never done what do you do first? Start writing code? NO You go to hotscripts.com or (insert your personal favorites here) and search for the most appropriate script. The problem with using CSS is that other other designers can copy and paste it. If you want to keep something more proprietary you need to hide some of the essential design elements away from the copy and pasters.
The new problem for plagiarists is that sites like digg will notice if you ripped off a "favored" site. When a band rips off Texaco's logo for their stickers everyone loves it, when some one does the same to a website we scream.
If you have ever downloaded a song you should shut up!
We are in the world of digital. Write it once and share it with the world.
If they had stolen their content that would be a different thing altogether. A similar look and feel... Well, in my book, that is a complement.
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