Design theft?!
Oct 2nd, 2008
I gave up trying to retain any control of my WordPress themes a while back. They are now distributed under a GPL license. The reason ? – other Christians thought they could use them without credit, even sell them in a couple of cases and pass them off as their own designs! But check this out…
Who ripped off who here? Was it the mighty Mars Hill or was it Imago Dei being as God-like as they possibly can? Or did they both pay the same guy to produce the coolest and most unique web design he could muster?
Mars Hill
Imago Dei
Of course Christians would never steal someone else’s design, would they?!
The source code for the myimagodei.com site includes the following:
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The following Html Code was generated by CoffeeCup Visual Site Designer.
Copyright 2008, CoffeeCup Software, Inc.
http://www.coffeecup.com
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Marshill.org, of course, has nothing of the sort. The sites themselves function very differently. But it IS uncanny how similar the design styles are. If I were feeling a bit more investigative, I might try to figure out which came first. But I can’t bring myself to care quite that much.
I don’t think Coffee Cup has anything to do with the design. They may have used the Coffee Cup editor to code the site, but someone still has to produce the design.
Good point, Tim. I guess I was assuming (incorrectly) that maybe it was some sort of template that came with Coffee Cup or something. But a slightly longer look around coffeecup.com makes me think it doesn’t come with templates that look anywhere near as nice as that.
According to the WayBack Machine at archive.org, myimagodei.com had a different look back in February of this year, and Mars Hill has had their current design longer than that. With the high profile that Mars Hill has, my guess is that the Imago Dei folks drew inspiration (cough, cough) from marshill.org.
I don’t know that this is so much a case of someone stealing a specific person’s design so much as it is just a style. Blogs for example often have a very distinct style. The backgrounds and colors can change, but often they look very similar. These two sites look similar to many other sites I’ve seen. Maybe they both copied somebody else? Or maybe they just saw some things they liked, put it together and made something for themselves.