Plagiarism 2 – The Plagiarism Strikes Back

Plagiarism 2 – The Plagiarism Strikes Back

It’s been a little while since our last plagiarism exposé, so I thought it’d be a good time to check in to see if anyone was copying our work. And well – sigh! – let’s just jump right in… again!

A copy of the Jimmyweb site

Poor copies of Jimmyweb

I’m not sure what to say, other than these copies aren’t even trying to be good.

First up is a trashy attempt at a copy from a team in “Brisbane”, who have a very similar origin story to us here at Jimmyweb…

“Latenight Coder was started by two mates, Harsh and Thomas, working after hours and on weekends, designing and building websites for a select handful of clients. Some of those clients are still actively using Latenight Coder today – clients like AG whole salers and GCT . Back then, website launches were far between, but we celebrated each and every one.”

These guys have lifted almost everything from us – the design, the copy, even images of our work. At least these guys remembered to change the phone number… so, points for that I guess?

Next up, these guys took two bites of the Jimmyweb site…

Site 1 and site 2 appear to both be built by the same person (unless the plagiarised has been plagiarised!).

Faux Mia

Page after page, the structure and content have been copied. They did go to the effort of rebuilding both sites in Wix (perhaps that explains the inferior quality), including all of the inner services pages.

On the upside, they did leave in links to our clients’ sites on some of these inner pages – so, uhhh, thanks for the links?!

While they made some attempt to create the design themselves inspired by the layout and content flow of the Jimmyweb site, they not only stole the content, but seem to have stolen some of our staff!

While their Core Values on the about us page have a striking similarity to ours, I’m guessing that Being Ethical isn’t one of them.

Special mention: A couple more sites that seem to have started to copy Jimmyweb and gave up – here and here.

Copied Content

While taking a look, I found countless copies of Jimmyweb content on other agency sites. I did however find a couple of standout efforts that were worthy of special mention.

Firstly, another local agency right here in Sydney – lifting our content word-for-word.

Copy Theif

Compared to the original…

Original Content

Note, their Symfony content was repeated in the WordPress block – I’m not even sure they would know what Symfony is!

And lastly, this agency made the effort to make their site look unique, while lifting page after page of content from our website. For example…

Compared to the original…

Although, I do find it amusing that on the homepage, they quote someone and give credit…

… surely the whole website should be wrapped in quotes!

As mentioned in our previous post, inspiration is a natural part of this industry and this job. We see websites all day, every day. It’s normal to see something we like and be inspired by it – to want to build something just as good. But to wholesale lift content, design or code from another site isn’t inspiration, it’s plagiarism pure and simple.

Some websites are copied at the behest of the client (which is short-sighted and bad for the brand), and sometimes it’s the developer pulling the wool over the client’s eyes – passing off work as their own and charging full price for work they didn’t actually do. At best, these developers are just lazy. And at worst, they are con artists – either way, they should be avoided.

We actually enjoy the process of designing and developing websites and delight at the response from our clients and their customers.