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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

A newspaperish grid layout hardly seems like something that's unique enough to go around accusing someone of ripping it off from you. Or did you rip off the New York Times et al?

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Newspaper grid layout, downloads the text of the stories, he even used a very similar font in his header graphic to the font in my header graphic -- and the font in my header graphic was a whimsical indulgence because it doesn't really look like a newspaper header font at all. The New York Times and many, many other papers use heavy gothic fonts for their names, and I think that if he got the design from there, he would have done the same.

If you want to accuse someone of plagiarism, you're going need a hell of a lot more evidence than "the font looks a bit similar".

Here's the deal: Create something better than he does, and people use your version. If he creates something better than you do, people use his version. All copying allowed. How about that?

There was someone on here a while ago that was concerned that someone stole his app a safe a 'pro' version without ads. The advice you give here is essentially the same advice they got.

If someone rips you off, improve on it and have the better product. It's too bad that your apps are so similar -- but the concept, layout and elements are old-hat. If he ripped you off on purpose I highly doubt he'd be eager about the HN community finding out about it.

So your rather harsh accusation of ripoff boils down to:

* Use of a certain layout style which is literally centuries old.

* Prefetching content, an extremely common practice in computing.

* A similar font.

I think you need to seriously reexamine the originality of your work.

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