As a client and friend of ours (sam clarke) has already learnt earlier this year, "a downside of freely sharing on the net is that not everyone will play fair."
Another one of our clients (designdough) experienced the same situation this week after their entire concept, design and code was stolen and replicated by a local! competitor who states "Cardiff's most established graphic design studios with over 20 years experience delivering effective, original graphic design solutions for a wide range of applications and clients".
I'm all for developers jumping in and seeing how things are done, It's interesting, a fast way to learn and a good way to improve your skills for later projects. But plagiarism is something everyone at codeworks strongly disagree on.
The company in question was contacted by our friends at designdough and after a few hours of discussion what was firstly changed, was then taken down. Rightly so! Now i personally can't comment on the circumstances of who was responsible for copying ours and designdough's hard work, but i can comment on the fact a company who states they deliver original content need to have a serious look at how they operate.
Personally, we would like to see an apology from designworld for stealing our code and an explanation as to how this happened and what they're going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again. Our intentions here are not to slander this company for a mistake, but highlight the important issue that if you outsource your work make sure you trust who you're working with.
It's also worth mentioning as much as we're annoyed we're also flattered that the design together with the code was that good, they felt the need to steal it, so together with designdough we must be doing something right!
Update: We've since had a response from the company; "we gave the brief to a freelancer which was 'big image, couple of panels of text' and what we were presented with we liked so it went straight up. Obviously though the buck ultimately stops with the Partners, so I can only apologise again for this incident and rest-assured that we will tighten up our procedures from now on and ensure that everything is checked in much more detail. We will obviously not be using that supplier again ..... Apologies again for this incident and I hope this puts your mind at rest regarding our intentions and integrity."
We're glad to hear from the company and consider the matter resolved, we hope that other companies can learn from this and get to know their suppliers a little better.
Call us for a chat on
