Stolen Website Design

[DJ Turner]

It has recently come to my attention that someone has outright stolen our website design.

Our site: http://www.denverseminary.edu/
Stolen site: http://www.vivianarodriguez-lab.com/index.html

Any suggestions on how to deal with this? I am working on having one of our Spanish-speaking professors translate an email message that I can send to them, but I would appreciate any other advice or thoughts that the community has on how to deal with it.

An Update (posted April 1, 2009)

Thanks to everyone for your advice! By way of update, our finance department has decided not to pursue legal action, and we are chalking it up to a compliment to our site. :-)

Just this week I received an email from a third party who had corresponded with the other website owner, and she expressed her deep concern over the matter. She had no idea the website design had been stolen. And apparently DataFizz, the "design" company she hired has done this before.

Thanks again for your input!

[Dee]

I'm just curious - how did you find out about the stolen website?

[DJ Turner]

Someone whom I don't know sent us an email about it. He has a Spanish name, but he did not identify himself as a student or other constituent of the Seminary. He just emailed to let us know, and also commented that he was neither an employee or client of the other site.

[Derek Pennycuff]

I've admired your work since I first saw it on EduStyle. But there's a big thick line between looking for inspiration and straight up theft. I've seen plenty of clone sites in higher ed, but this is a blatant example. Unfortunately, I'm not finding anything in the source code, at a glance, that "proves" anything. And I'm not sure what the legal options are. There's a Flickr group for sharing design rip offs and other means of public humiliation for the guilty party. But beyond that I'm clueless.

[DJ Turner]

Thanks, Derek, but I can't take all the credit for the site. Monk Development did a huge chunk of the work. :-) That said, there are actually a couple of clues that "prove," or at least strongly support the theory, that it was stolen. The CSS file name was not changed (it's still called monkcms.css) and if you disable the CSS, it shows "Denver Seminary" twice -- or at least that's where things were yesterday. I haven't yet checked today.

I am also not aware of what legal options, if any, there are, but I do very much appreciate all the input we've received on this forum!

[Derek Pennycuff]

Oh wow, you're right. They still have an H1 and an H3 that mention Denver Seminary by name. I guess it's too much to expect thieves to not be sloppy.

And I was using "you" in "your work" in the collective sense. :)