This is beyond the pale and it is not a case of 'live and learn'. Every single one of us as developers have taken the page layouts of others, even looked at their code and then coded something ourselves based around it. What you don't do is list layout code straight and insert your own images and URLs. I take it you're investing enough to employ people with HTML, CSS and front-end skills?
This is a little beyond the pale and I fail to see why DHH should contact them discreetly. No, I don't like DHH's attitude sometimes but lifting code straight from someone's site is just so brain-dead it defies belief. The vast majority of developers would certainly have a look at other peoples' layouts but lifting code straight is just unreal.
This will be controversial, but if it were real programming code i would be angry. Since it's just html/css, static stuff, one may say it's not a big deal. In fact that was curebit's first response: they asked if they should keep the code and just add credit. I know it's wrong, but in the broad internet ethics it seems to be considered a certain form of fair use.
"if it were real programming code i would be angry " -> the work of "programmers" is worth plenty, but the work of designers is worth zilch. To be fair, this is also the attitude taken by Curebit.
They're sitting around and one of them reads the 37 signals blog post about A/B testing and conversion rates. He says "Dude, do you think their landing page will actually convert better than our current one?"
"I don't know, lets try it."
So one of them snags the source from Highrise and changes some images around. I'm sure he previewed it, it looked fine and he published it. He probably forgot to change out the button images because they looked fine.
Who knows if this is how it happened, but it really seems like it could have been an honest (but definitely pretty stupid) mistake.
Any developer with any intelligence or skill doesn't do that. You don't just 'publish' something. As a developer there is no way I can imagine this being done innocently because it is something that is always at the forefront of your mind.
Are you an entrepreneur? If you are, and you've had any success, I'm sure you've "just published" something along the way. It's actually a rather important skill. Not that you should copy and paste something to try it out - you definitely shouldn't - but quick and dirty trial implementations are fairly common.
Edit: Not sure why this is getting downvoted, anyone care to explain? Action in startups is not always deliberate.
Ah thanks. Rereading that, I can see what you mean. I mostly said that to caveat that there are many ways to do entrepreneurship badly, and most of the successful paths involve some amount of shooting from the hip.
I have to agree with you here... Working in a startup is a hectic and crazy lifestyle which involves lots of mistakes, lots of learning, and lots of "hurry up and get x (feature, fix, etc) out the door", which results in mistakes being made. We can all sit around and pretend that we all write bullet proof, meticulously tested, beautiful code all the time and only release things that have been tested extensively and peer-reviewed, but that's just not how it works in the real world most of the time.
It's not too hard to imagine. Some designer was assigned to replicate the page and he did the easiest thing possible. They probably figured nobody gives a crap, and they would normally be right. But for whatever reason somebody decided to call these particular guys out and for whatever reason this particular case caught on the tech sites.
I would bet money there is not one web designer here who has never taken a tiny snippet from another site. It's kinda more of a matter of the quantity of content that they took. Plus the hot linking was especially dumb.
I believe it is always something you should consider to cover your back anyway. It doesn't have to be too expensive and you can at least use it to give a client some assurance.
