Grrrrr….. Site Ripping Bastards!

Can’t say too much about this, but I found out the other day that one of my site designs was ripped (again). Ripped in a bad way. There is CSS on their site that doesn’t do anything and there are commented out sections and links to pages that don’t exist (but were required styles and retired pages on my customer’s site). And not just that site, the thieving bastards decided to steal other pieces from another site and an email I did also. So what should I do? What act of vengeance should I unleash on these pilfering asshats?

You want to know what I am going to do?

Not a damn thing. And that is the most frustrating thing about it.

“Why the hell not?” you may be asking (or not, but either way I’ll try to explain.)

Without divulging too much, here is the lowdown (and I apologize for the vagueness, but I do value my job and you never know who can put 2 and 2 together.)

I work for a firm that specializes in a certain niche market, providing design and marketing services for both small businesses of that market and the larger companies that serve those businesses. So we do B-to-C and B-to-B for that niche market. And we are even more specialized within areas of that market, so everyone knows just about everyone. So you would think that since everyone knows everyone, something like this is not very likley to happen. I thought so too. But we would both be mistaken.

One of our largest B-to-B customers also owns a small business like all the other ones they serve. So we did some work for that business’s small business and some of their not-so-small businesses. Well, one of their customers liked the small business site so much they decided to go ahead and use it for themselves. So why would we let that slide, why would our customer not want to evoke the almighty copyright infringement smackdown?

Because, the thieving customer is also one of their biggest customers.

But was it really the customer? I can’t be certain, of course, but if one considers the source of the email piece they ripped off (it only went to the B-to-B customers) I find it really hard to believe that it was some reckless web monkey and not someone affiliated with the business itself.

So here I am. A customer’s site has been stolen by one of their own customers and I can’t do a thing.

Sad things is that it really just comes down to money -  nobody is going to say anything because the business that stole it, spends a metric assload with the big business. Does that entitle them to take what they want? Not in my book - they could obviously afford a legit site. In fact, if they liked all that work so much, all they had to do was call my company. It is what we do. But instead of choosing to employ the same people to produce a theft-worthy site for them, they decided to just take.

But I can’t do a damn thing. Grrrr…..

Dammit, karma, hurry up.