Mistrial? No.

Quite an uproar over whether or not my new piracy policy is justified. Let me clarify some things and be done with it.

A few days ago I came across the appropriately titled (both for the author’s suggested purpose and the public judgment that followed) trial.htm while looking at the referrers on Designologue.com. What I originally saw was a fully-styled copy of my homepage devoid of most background images (including identifying logos and photos) but with working IFR (see also sIFR). I almost dismissed the page as an innocent experiment—until I took a look at the source. It seemed odd that the only change made to the source was to the author and copyright meta tags. ShaunInman.com was still plastered all over the page title, search field and HTML copyright notice in the footer.

The next day I came across the url again, this time in the referrers for ShaunInman.com. I revisited to find that the entire page was represented including the banner photo and text, client work thumbnails, even my favicon. I showed it to the guys at work who thought I should go public with the link. “It’s not public facing,” I said, “and he hasn’t really done anything wrong.”

When I checked my recent referrers again yesterday morning, there it was, trial.htm. Only now, the gray banner had changed to reflect the new company’s name and my content was replaced with the self-congratulatory market-speak (including a new site launch date only a week away). At that point I hopped over to Withlime’s contact page (which I had found the previous day) and tried to send Matt an email saying that I hoped he wasn’t planning on doing what it looked like he was doing. But the contact form didn’t work.

My logic was this: If someone was experimenting with my CSS or IFR, why were only the content and a few identifying graphics being changed? There was no evidence that the CSS had been modified at all. Like I said in my original post, something about this just didn’t sit right with me. It’s not like this is an isolated occurrence, it’s been happening with increasing regularity and I’m tired of dealing with it. I made a decision and I see no reason not to stand by it. (Matt’s apparent history of “borrowing” others work just to draw publicity doesn’t score him any points either—especially with an upcoming site launch as motivation.)

So case closed, I’m moving on.