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Joyent Weblog
Falkner Winery: Hands off! Unless you ply me with wine.
So these guys (updated link…see below) ripped off our website design. (They also ripped off some design elements from the corkd.com site.) I sent them a kind note:
To whom it may concern,
We’re not happy that the designer of your website decided to rip-off Joyent’s award winning design (launched in October, 2005).
We’d like you to change it. The design is our property. All rights are reserved.
We could be convinced to license the design to you in exchange for regular shipments of Falkner product for as long as you continue to use our design. Stipulating that Falkner product is as good as our design.
David Young
CEO
Joyent, Inc.
http://www.joyent.com
I mean, we are fatboys.
Update: the website has been updated. I’d like to thank the designer of the Falkner Winery who contacted me.
Commenting is closed for this article.
How did you figure out they had stolen your design?
— Rob Elkin 783 days ago #Friends.
— David Young 783 days ago #Oooh. Always liking the “payment-in-kind” method.
— Kevan 783 days ago #Hm, I don’t really see that much similarity between http://www.joyent.com and http://www.falknerwinery.com.
I think this is just a bribe to get more fat boy wine.
— Joe 783 days ago #Since becoming a customer recently, I’ve generally been impressed with the corporate attitude I’ve seen coming from Joyent.
Maybe I’m missing the sarcasm (which geeks like me are known to do) but “rip-off” is pushing it for what the Falkner people did. Looking at the two sites, I see two implementations of a popular site layout with a few colors in common.
As a musician and a coder, I use other people’s ideas all the time. I observe the same phenomenon in graphic design and science, though I’m not a practitioner of either. There is a line between influence and theft, and I don’t see how Falkner crossed it.
Perhaps if I looked through their HTML and Javascript I’d see some obvious signs of copy-and-paste, but on the surface I don’t see how Joyent has a beef with Falkner.
OTOH, the bit about asking for free wine was pretty cool and very much in line with the Joyent spirit I have come to admire.
Apologies if the whole thing was meant as a joke and I’m just being dense.
— mkb 783 days ago #—mkb
I have to agree – I think you’re being a little harsh this time around. Even if you feel you have a case I have always thought this kind of public flogging from otherwise mature individuals/companies a bit disappointing. That goes for the guys behind Cork’d too. Chances are there’s an inexperienced web developer behind the design and a private email exchange between all parties would have sorted it out.
— Andrew 783 days ago #After a quick look the only thing I can see that is similar is the color palate. What design elements did they steal exactly?
— Anthony 783 days ago #I think those of you confused about the “rip off” want to see this:
http://hivelogic.com/articles/2006/09/29/look_familiar
In particular, I think the larger bottle is the real giveaway. They’ve rotated the bottle and (it looks to me) kept the little circular effect at the neck in the same location.
To my mind that that effect should depend on the rotation of the bottle. i.e. you rotate the bottle, you can’t simply rotate the circle, you need to reposition it and rotate it by a different amount.
— Mike Abdullah 783 days ago #I’ve always like Panic Softwares approach to this:
http://www.panic.com/extras/ripoff/
— Scott 783 days ago #I don’t this is harsh at all.
— daf 783 days ago #This sure doesn’t look like a rip off to me. The page frame and background stuff is clearly using the same idea, but you guys definitely do NOT own that. Normally you guys seem cool, right now you seem grasping and petty.
— lukem 783 days ago #Looks like their nodes are showing.
http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/000016.html
— Jack Shedd 783 days ago #(Ironically, Cameron Moll designed the Joyent website)
— Jack Shedd 783 days ago #Cameron was the designer, with lots of input/help from John Gruber, Bryan Bell, and myself.
@lukem. You’re right, we don’t own “ideas”, we own designs. But my email to the Falkner folks is mostly tongue-in-cheek. Dry humor. I hope they offer dry wine.
— David Young 783 days ago #This is more a case of similar look than similar CSS, though, at least at a cursory glance through the files.
I remember when some dude in France misunderstood the Creative Commons license on Khoi Vinh’s site and did a riff on subtraction.com. It seemed to be mostly a language barrier, though, but it did lead to clarification in the last line of his home page.
— Deirdre Saoirse Moen 783 days ago #David – ah. Didn’t mean to miss attribute. You guys did a fantastic job on it.
— Jack Shedd 783 days ago #After a little investigation, I’ve discovered the name: WebNetCreative, a company out of NC. They list Falkner as a client here: http://www.webnetcreative.com/web_recent1.asp (though, admittedly, they link to an old(?) design)...
WHOIS info still has Falkner tied to WNC as well.
— Chris Harrison 783 days ago #re: WebNetCreative
I don’t think they did this one and that’s an old client list. The reason I say this is based on their other work, that doesn’t look like their style. Also, webnetcreative.com and falknerwinery.com are hosted in different places even though WebNetCreative’s site says they host it—not that there’s any guarantee they host their clients and themselves in the same place, but very likely.
— Chris Scott 783 days ago #The reason I suggest that is because WNC is still handling their DNS and is listed as the Technical contact for the FW domain.
And if you look at the topmost site they list on the page, the design isn’t half bad, though there is no telling if it’s original or based on other stuff…
— Chris Harrison 783 days ago #Did you guys ever consider the fact that this can be a publicity stunt. They sell wines not web services. Their site is being hit thousands of time today in response to all the link to it. Once the dust settles they’ll end up with a bunch of new WINE customers. IMO, the more we all talk the more money they make.
— Bruno 783 days ago #Rule of Joyeur: we delete anonymous comments.
— David Young 783 days ago #Erh… I don’t see the rip off too. From CorkD yup, from Joyent sites I know about I can’t see it. At all. Any pointers to it?
— Jérémie 783 days ago #I see the similarities. Load joyent.com and falknerwinery.com on two separate tabs then switch tabs. Logo upper left, links on the left, content on the right… it’s a ripoff.
So did they send anything yet? Email, wine?
— Joel 782 days ago #This side-by-side comparison shows some similarity between Joyent and Falkner…
Courtesy of Hivelogic
— Tony 782 days ago #Ahh man, that anon comment was just a little dry humor about how bad Textdrive has gotten. Sorry your site design got lifted, that sucks, but make Textdrive better!
— Josh Mascow 782 days ago #@Josh: We’re working hard on Textdrive. You’re going to see big changes in October and November. Contact me if you’re a customer and not getting what you expected. I will fix it.
— David Young 782 days ago #I have to say it looks like a close call to me even though I am leaning a bit more towards ripoff. Not the bottle, that is all too clear, but the website.
The problem is in what aspects of a design you can “own”. To what degree can you own a page layout? Who should be paid royalties for the basic style used in 98% of all blogs? (header, right-hand menu, single column)
Can I use a box with rounded corners and a slight dropshadow?
A website is not art in the same way the Mona Lisa is art. It is more in line with industrial design, typography and other crafts that rely on user interaction and usability. The purpose is to make a website readable, usable and so on. And to do so, a good designer should take note of conventions to help the user understand and “read” the interface.
The much hyped “The Web 2.0” will definitely make these issues worse. An application most definitely sould follow established principles more.
What puts this case over the edge a bit for me is the background colors and the spacing and margins. If you take both sites and imagine them with white backgrounds it would be a lot harder for me to cry ripoff.
BTW When I try to ripoff a design I usually end up with something quite differently within only a few hours. :)
— Martin Westin 782 days ago #You can’t look at the Faulkner site and not see the resemblance. But, for all of the sensitive folks why don’t we say they’ve borrowed heavily from the look and feel of Joyner.com (i.e. copied).
— ItsJustMe 782 days ago #I have found the company responsible for the Corkd/Joyent rp off: Third & Grand
Check my blog for more info.
— Ryan Merket 781 days ago #Yup clear ripoff indeed. Sorry, I was confusing Joyeur.com and Joyent.com :(
— Jérémie 781 days ago #Flakner Winery has been removed from CSSmania.com. We apologize for adding it to the list.
— GaBuBu 781 days ago #“Rip-off” is definitely a stretch.
“Did you guys ever consider the fact that this can be a publicity stunt.”
If anything, it’s a stunt on the Joyent side…Joyent has way more to gain by drumming up some blogosphere buzz. Although they might have mis-judged on this one.
— pwb 780 days ago #I am still a bit more annoyed that Ray Falkner, the owner, seems to have brushed this off and has gone so far to censor comments off the blog. I can understand his fear of bad publicity, but deleting content is surely not going to prove in his benefit – especially since we’re documenting it on other sites. He should have posted up a clean and professional response – I even mentioned it to their company… newbie bloggers, forget that everyone else has a blog themselves to post when that happens.
— Brady J. Frey 779 days ago #Well, will you accuse this gentlemen of copying that certain other person too?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll8Qm8yDj-8&eurl=
— AG 779 days ago #This is off topic, Joyent – will you think about dove-tailing a similar service that DreamHost is offering called File Forever to BingoDisk?
Pleeeeeeeeeeeease.
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/10/03/itunes-music-sore/
— Sarah D. 779 days ago #@AG: No. What’s YouTube?
@Sarah: No. What’s DreamHost?
YouHost. YouDream. TubeDream. TubeHost.
— David Young 778 days ago #If you do not see the ripoff you can see it here.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbenjamin/255656615/
— Jeremy 778 days ago #Looks to me like it’s just the wine bottles that have changed.
— Jacques Marneweck 776 days ago #I dont see how the falkner site is anything like Corkd? Have you all gone mad? – maybe the colors are the same but if i was to make a wine site id make it with reds and cork colors.
— Anthony 776 days ago #Anthony the wine bottles were copied from Cork’d and just rotated slightly. They have since changed.
— Jacques Marneweck 772 days ago #