Indian Laptop Company Stole Our Entire Site

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3526771

by msacca • 14 years ago

1 10 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I guess the 37 signals fiasco isn't an uncommon occurrence. I was checking our analytics this morning when I noticed we've been getting some strange traffic regarding "Laptop Repair In Cochin." Well I dug around and found a site that copied and pasted our codebase outright, HTML / JS & CSS - then tweaked a couple CSS variables. I built the Wordpress theme from scratch about a year and a half ago and never released it for sale. This laptop repair site doesn't appear to be using Wordpress. Our site was featured on several design galleries at the time (it's in desperate need of an upgrade now, we just don't have the time) which, I'm sure, is how they found it to rip-off.

Check it out: Our Site: http://www.tinyfactory.co Their Site: http://www.laptoprepairkerala.com

I suppose imitation is the sincerest form of flattery - and a great reminder that it's time to upgrade our site ;)

dangoldin2• 14 years ago

Why do you think it's a Russian company? Cochin is a city in Kerala, India.

In any case, you can definitely have some fun with them by changing some server settings or file names to get their site to just say "This was stolen from www.tinyfactory.co"

There was a post of a guy doing something like that on here a while back but I can't dig it up.

msacca3• 14 years ago

You're absolutely right - that was just my own ignorance.

Thanks for the tip ;) I'm looking into it now

dangoldin2• 14 years ago

Haha no worries. I'm Russian so I'm a bit sensitive =) Not that Russians are completely honorable but it's not always the Russians!

rbanffy3• 14 years ago

They have copied the site. Changing the files will accomplish very little unless they are only caching the originals.

Anyway, the credits are there: http://www.laptoprepairkerala.com/css/style.css

msacca3• 14 years ago

Yep - at least they were so kind ;)

Looks like there's just a couple images linked from our img sub domain - everything else was copied and pasted.

princeverma• 14 years ago

Looking at the source code, they are also using your analytics code as it is. how stupid these can be.

sebphfx• 14 years ago

this is crazy! I didn't know people were going that far. They think that everything is to be used freely. I wonder how these "designers" think. Do they know it's wrong?

msacca3• 14 years ago

Seriously - we're getting all of their traffic showing up in our analytics account - that's probably the most annoying part.

rbanffy3• 14 years ago

I think the worst part is that their "contact" label doesn't properly line up with the rest of the content. Lame ;-)

Indian Laptop Company Stole Our Entire Site

Related Stories