Site rips have been around forever. Just like everything else, the net is not always the nicest of places. If you have a design that is really well liked, there will always be someone out there who will go the distance to copy the design down to every last detail. So, what can you do about this?

Discovering Site Rips

It happens daily, especially to the very best of designers. One of the most recent cases includes Matt Brett’s feedicons.com. Matt discovered the rip yesterday, which was his exact design with graphics and text changed – but fonts and everything else remaining the same.

When I woke up today, I discovered Devlounge version one had also been ripped. The design remained exactly the same, and the subdomain was even “dl-clone”.

Depending on how well known your site is, many times it will not take long for others or yourself to discover a rip. In my case, as it has been with others as well, the ripper left a stats tracking code remaining in the header. In other cases, people will leave links back to your own site.

What to do after discovering a rip

Initially, after realizing someone is attempting to rip off your site, your blood begins to boil. Who can blame you, when you are witnessing your hard work being spoiled by other unrespectful people.

You have a couple of early options:

• Contact the host – Use a whois service to find out the dns of the ripper’s url, especially if the site is already live. Let the host know this person has ripped off your site, and if you can not work it out with the person themselves, you’d like to see the site shut down.
• Talk directly to the person – If you can get their contact information, try to settle things directly with them. Of course, this will almost never be a friendly conversation, but as a ripper, you weren’t intending to be friendly anyway.
• Get designer information – Sometimes, people will be paying other “designers” to do work for them, and the designers are the ones selling the rips. Don’t blame the site owner for this if they trully didn’t know. In some cases though, site owners will outsource and find someone willing to rip off your site for them, in which cases, both designer and client own their share of the blame.

If talks do not go well, your best bet is to leave a large stain on the person’s reputation. Site such as Ripperhunting, which allow you to submit the original and ripped sites.

Be sure to watch out for young designers as well. When I was first starting on the web, I did rip designs and their code, opened them open and dreamweaver and experimented with the code, but most times you can tell by the rip itself or by getting in touch with the person what their true intents really are.