When Floral Imitation is Not Flattery - Plagiarism On The Web
Imitation, they say is the sincerest form of flattery. They also say success breeds imitation. Every now and then we find our competitors ordering flower arrangements from us, which makes us wonder if our bouquets are being copied and sold by other florists. We have regularly battled image and content thievery, where we have had instances of other flower websites using our images to mislead customers for commercial gains. We have also seen a couple of websites clone our web layout completely. But recently, we were quite surprised to see a florist advertise publicly for a developer whose primary job is to copy the design and layout of Arena Flowers. A copy of the advert from the web:
We need our ecommerce site UI to be redesigned and clone www.arenaflowers.com (ours is much simpler). This includes streamlining flows, enhancing the color scheme, and making the pages more appealing and easy for users to comprehend. Our exsiting site has been built on x- cart with Smarty applied. Candidate must have solid working knowledge in Smarty templet aplications. Samples needed. Skills in CSS and Javascript highly desirable. previous experience in Smarty is a must
We are quite proud of our efforts of setting a benchmark among online florists. To imitate a business is to pay the business a genuine, unintended compliment and we gladly accept the compliment. But we are a bit wary of content thieves showing a systematic disregard towards copyright and trademark laws.
The advent of Web 2.0 has spawned a new generation of public domain websites, where users are encouraged to post their views on a variety of online channels including blogging and social networking. The distribution of product images on these channels by content publishers does help in building brand awareness for Arena Flowers, but only when explicit references are made to the source of our fresh flower images. As long as our images or content are not being used for commercial gains we have no objections, although we would be happy if publishers source the images to our site as a polite gesture for copying. However, we get nothing when publishers benefit commercially by using our content and images.
The Intellectual Property Organisation in the UK, states that ownership of content is an automatic right and there’s no need to register for Copyright in the United Kingdom (We are registered trademark owners of our Brand Name and related associations). Secondly, all of our pages are clearly marked with the Copyright symbol. Finally, for violation of Copyright for commercial gains, criminal charges can be brought resulting in severe fines, compensation and jail for violators. We’re not taking this too seriously, but it’s worth understanding the rules!
Such issues highlight the importance of responsible blogging and publishing in the online world. It is exceedingly important for website publishers to take notice of copyright issues while posting content and media on to their web pages. From our experience, we have realised that it is necessary to identify best practice measures for website publishing to avoid unwanted complications. Our approach:
- Never copy anything from other websites, particularly commercial sites, even if they don’t have a Copyright symbol. In the UK as with many other countries, authors have an automatic right to the content they create. If you are compelled to use an image or content from a commercial website for non-commercial reasons, always provide a link back to the main website from where the image or content was obtained.
If your post needs a picture to convey the message, your best bet is to get the graphic from one of the royalty free image sites like Foto Search. Also, support the Creative Commons by opting to use images rated under the project. Although, Creative Commons is not the legal entity, it is a non-profit organisation working towards creating a universal copyright license.- It is a great practice to use public domain news websites, Governmental and authority websites for your posts. If you find an interesting post or an article on another website, and wish to comment upon it on your site or blog, use a short quote and provide a link to that source before adding your thoughts and views for refining the point.
By adopting these simple measures, you should not only assure your legal rights but also help in protecting your own works.
Similar posts: If you enjoyed this post, you may find our other posts on Defamation Advice Tips for Bloggers and Protecting your brand in the Search Engines interesting.
Filed under: Ethics & Environment, Flowers, General, Marketing, Matters Webby on September 2nd, 2008
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Well at least you are doing something right if people are copying you that blatantly.
Of course it might be saying they just want someone to copy your concept.
How are you guys following up on this? Legally?
Hello Adrian,
We do want to believe that we are doing things right. :)
We haven’t really thought about it from a legal perspective as I guess there is nothing much we could do.
It’s an Australian site and they already seem to have copied our quick links table from our home page (Footer). They haven’t bothered changing the colour as well and it looks a bit odd on their site as their layout looks a bit different.
This stuff happens a lot online.
I guess you just need to keep iterating and taking things to the next level and not worry so much about what others are doing,
I agree, Adrian. Copying the look and feel of a website is easy. Copying a business model, way of working and an ethos is a lot harder! We keep an eye on our competitors, as any business should, but spend most of our time focusing on our business and whether we’re delivering the right products and service to our customers. Customers pay the bills, not the competitors, so our primary aim is to keep them as happy as possible!