Stealing Is a Skill | Hacker News Reader

Stealing Is a Skill

ben-mini.com

268 pointsbewal416152 comments

I feel like there’s a difference between Virgil Abloh being brought in to work on an iteration of the Air Force 1s and simply ripping off a design from an unrelated company, presumably without permission, and making a few tweaks.

Isn't it also well-documented that Virgil Abloh stole more in the ~100% range from up-and-coming designers who then saw nothing for their work?

If it is, I'm sure that you can easily produce that documentation.

https://kunekuneyokai.home.blog/2019/01/18/virgil-abloh-stea... from a quick look.

Eh. Allow me to play devil's advocate, for funsies. Yes, as the blog post states, Virgil Abloh "stole" (or "steals"). But he did not steal, he "stole" ("steals"). That is, his entire modus operandi was appropriating and "elevating" the work of others. This was expected of him. If his inspiration was not obvious, then it was time to start looking for whoever he did "steal" from.

Some (not 100%) of this was from lesser-known designers; thanks to his reputation, I'm now aware of several of them. I recognize the ambivalence I personally would feel if someone famous "stole" my art, reposted it, and my original post was subsequently found and exploded in engagement, but never to the level of the post of the person who "stole" it (a hypothetical analogous to the subject at hand). By extension, I recognize that this isn't a perfectly clean practice.

If you read the blog, some of his work was explicit collaborations, though. Evidently, some people saw value in his "theft" and were happy to leave the doors unlocked.

And then there is, of course, the "macro-level" elephant in the room: the fact that he was a black man in a role mostly occupied by white people, in an industry with hundreds of years of history of the same kind of "theft" that he engaged in - often not of young creatives in stable and affluent Western democracies, but poor artisans in communities whose entire historical trajectory could have been changed with the proper attribution and remuneration for their work.

For better or worse, Virgil Abloh's career exists in and is recognized within that context, and his "theft" is tolerated because of the way criticism of it would seem to impugn the industry at-large, and perhaps force changes within it that would be rather uncomfortable for all involved. Much easier to just celebrate him as a visionary. Are they being true to the realities or just lying big? shrug Either way, don't hate the player...

(The important thing is that GGP is technically wrong :).)

(I expect disagreement, please just do it thoughtfully, based on what I actually wrote.)

The main reason Abloh could work this way was because his buddy Kanye West was famous and this gave the work huge exposure and crucially exposure to a newer audience. That's why fashion companies liked it, it was a new market.

Otherwise this "elevation" of other past work is extremely common practice in arts. Every other art student does recontextualisation even brands do lots of self-referential work. That is why much of the fashion world never cared much about Abloh. It was just not very novel or interesting to them.

About him being black. I think fashion industry is one of the most diverse and black lgbtq+ friendly industries there is but it's extremely elitist. So I doubt anyone cared that he was black. More likely they were annoyed about him being outsider with no formal education who exploded on the scene mostly thanks to his connections and popularity. While the work was always kinda mid.

The modern fashion industry as we know it has always had black workers and designers, but it was essentially unheard of for a black man to be named the artistic director of a major legacy fashion house. Particularly for businesses that touch the luxury space, much of the last few centuries have involved taking as much as can be taken from non-white, non-male artists and artisans without being forced to give credit or, god forbid, a leadership role. Abloh's ascension to just such a leadership role at Louis Vuitton was objectively a watershed moment.

As you say, "elevation" and appropriation are extremely common practices in fashion in particular, so the (passive-aggressive) ire he inspires in some circles would have to be based on something other than the way he worked. I don't think it was his professional background, either, considering that he had an advanced creative degree (in architecture) and several years of experience building brands independently and interning under established businesses.

Certainly, "elitism" gets closest to describing the true source, but I'll note that there is no fundamental disagreement or mutual exclusivity between that and "racism"; in fact, they often come paired. The latter, as we know, often distorts perception, leading to things like incorrect reads of Abloh's career and work as "not sophisticated," or "not influential," or "not novel or interesting," or as "kinda mid."

It is true and it is trivial to go find it yourself, it's been widely and repeatedly documented for the better part of a decade

The best way to make a really boring and generic product pop is... by copying a really boring and generic marketing page. God I miss the old internet. Give me some insane pixelated flash website over this bland trash any day. https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-websites-in-the-early-...

Really love the "eye-grabbing top fold"

::looks at bootstrap hero styling::

Oh, right.

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

I went to the Mintlify page they copied.

Don’t actually know what the product is and why it might be valuable to me.

Sure is pretty though.

> God I miss the old internet.

I recently discovered that the author of gzip still retains that 90's feel on his home page: http://gailly.net/

> When you recreate someone’s creation, you learn their story: every piece of brilliance, tradeoff, and imperfection.

I vehemently disagree that this happens. What you see is the end result, and thinking and struggling through for each element is not present. It is like copying the Mona Lisa and claiming the relationship with the sitting model and her smell and feel and complaints about cramped neck is all in the copied painting.

(Please do not change the cursor, specially the size. There is a reason I changed it.)

I agree. In fact, it's even worse: often times you miss the tradeoffs.

With Software in particular, I often encounter designs that copy a pattern from another popular piece of software, but without critically thinking about what the pattern is for or if it's even appropriate for their system, or even worse, assuming that because it exists and is popular that it must be good, when in fact it's terrible.

If recreating someone else's creation truly learned us, I believe the world would be a tremendously better place.

I used to run a lunch study group where we took some old crusty load bearing software, read the documentation thoroughly, and then dissected it, reading source and comments and trying to distill what it achieved well separate from what it achieved in spite of itself.

We learned a lot.

> I often encounter designs that copy a pattern from another popular piece of software, but without critically thinking about what the pattern is for or if it's even appropriate for their system, or even worse, assuming that because it exists and is popular that it must be good, when in fact it's terrible.

The very definition of "cargo cult" in a software context.

I think you romanticize it quite a bit. Painters/artists like any professionals are mostly there just to do the work. Even with Mona Lisa It's very likely that nobody that day cared about smell of the model it was just one other day at the office.

What copying does really teach you is how to actually put the paint on the canvas, how to actually make the image, how to see the details. That's the reason why copying is one of the most common learning techniques in visual arts.

Good luck painting by smelling the emotions and atmosphere of the moment.

Is the state of the webdesign really in a point where people bluntly copy others work for commercial purposes and celebrate these acts on their blogs? I think the line is pretty clear here. I remember the old Dan Mall's article on this topic which is much more inspirational (and "correct"): https://medium.com/@danielmall/stealing-your-way-to-original...

Do you not believe that the design of the "stolen" landing page was not itself 97% stolen from marketing landing pages that came before it?

It's unusual seeing the process stated so bluntly, but for something as cookie-cutter as a company homepage this has been how web designers have done things for decades. Or, at the very least, it's how the craft is learned.

I don't think it was.

I think the Mintlify designers viewed dozens if not hundreds of examples, then thought very carefully about exactly what they needed to express for their page and how best to express it. Then they built their page step by step, sweating over every detail.

Then Kibu came along, lifted the entire thing, changed "3%" of it and called it their own.

What Kibu did is gross.

Agreed. As someone who has built landing pages like that professionally you take inspiration from a wide range of sources.

Directly copying is tacky and immoral - it's also not effective. You should be thinking about how to position _your product_ not how someone else positioned their product.

A breakneck race toward absolute decline.

> Is the state of the webdesign really in a point where people bluntly copy others work for commercial purposes and celebrate these acts on their blogs?

Yes and the reason is not subtle...

We'll see much more of that now: people defending theft and then arguing that if you change the position of one comma in the entirety of Harry Potter, then it's an acceptable new product.

It's crystal clear why: LLMs are very good at copying / stealing / tweaking.

What's not clear though is how are licenses, including the open-source ones, respected here?

I'm not just talking about copying a website pixel-for-pixel: I'm talking about things like re-implementing a compiler, supposedly from scratch, when we all know it's not at all a clean room implementation.

Expect a wave of "theft is good" from the same people who are pushing 24/7 "buy commercial AI models subscriptions" content (which I have btw so no need to sell me more of them).

> We bet that vibecoding would allow us to move faster

"Theft is good"

> people defending theft and then arguing that if you change the position of one comma in the entirety of Harry Potter, then it's an acceptable new product.

History rhymes, indeed. Almost two centuries ago, Balzac wrote:

> A man spends ten years of his life searching for an industrial secret, a machine, some kind of discovery, he takes out a patent, he believes he is master of his thing, he is followed by a competitor who, if he has not foreseen everything, perfects his invention with a screw, and thus takes it out of his hands. [Illusions perdues, 1843]

Copywork is an exercise where writers just copy verbatim another writers work.

If you haven’t done it, it is an extraordinary way to see how the greats work.

It also tends to improve your own writing skills - at least as long as you are copying from your betters.

This seems like the web design version of this.

Obligatory link to a relevant Jorge Luis Borges story: Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (about an author who copied Don Quixote word for word)

https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl10/Pierre-Mena...

Pierre Menards Quixote is not a copy. It is a perfect recreation. While it is word-for-word identical to the original, the whole ironic humor of Borges text is that it is not a copy.

Edit: Which you might know well enough. Just wanted to add some more context.

A bit tough to say this, but transformers are trained the same way.

No. They're trained on the data, but there's no point in training at which they go through some exercise that involves creating copies of some of their input using the model being trained.

In any case, why is it "a bit tough to say this"? You thought your ability to learn was irreproducible?

You're right that I jumped the gun and the analogy is not accurate. The point where they are similar is that you have the prefix as context as you try to type out the next word; it is a more deliberate form of reading, and when you do this there's an element of anticipation and analysis as you write each word. It's not quite the same as constantly trying to guess the next word, in my mind the elevated way of thinking was close, probably as close as it's humanely possible, but the analogy does break down there.

On the other hand, you can embrace all this and still let others weep about humanity a little.

i have a vague memory of hunter s thompson talking about sitting down and typing out the great gatsby to see how it would feel to write a great american novel

Related, Raymond Chandler says in his letters that he taught himself to write a novelette by copying one (by Erle Stanley Gardner). He took the original story and wrote a detailed synopsis, then wrote a novelette from the synopsis, compared it to the original, did rewrites, and so on until he understood what tricks Gardner had used to make the scenes work.

Ben Franklin did this as well. He writes about this exercise in his autobiography.

Well I did not learn to write, but came to appreciate a certain kind of minimalism by using a recursive 4-stages narrative model (Greimas) to study some novels by Haruki Murakami.

What really struck me was the fact every single segment down to the level of phrases had a well-delimited function with respect to the rest of the story. A well told story is like a perfect tiling. No gaps that couldn't possibly be closed, no overlap, every tile well-delimited and composing nicely with its neighbors, and more importantly, a way to decompose well aligned tiles (summaries) into well-aligned subtiles (elaborations): if these conditions are met, you'll be able to write a story that conserves something at every scale, i.e. coherence, and hopefully the interest of the reader!

This was my first thought as well. Hunter S. Thompson used to copy Hemingway by hand to internalize his cadence.

This also works in drawing and painting. One of my painting teachers used to admonish us: "copy, copy, copy".

Jazz musicians also copy each other's solos for learning and practice purposes, but they would never actually perform more than a couple well placed quotes or licks from another player.

I think there's a big difference between jazz and corporate landing pages. Should we be surprised or shocked when different brands of microwave ovens have very similar controls?

> Should we be surprised or shocked when different brands of microwave ovens have very similar controls?

No, but OTOH I'd be a little bit surprised and confused if someone who designed microwave oven controls wrote a self-important blog post about how skillfully they copied another's design.

> "I think there's a big difference between jazz and corporate landing pages."

Hard agree. I had to laugh at that sentence. I realized it wasn't really a fair analogy but also just kind of going off the copywriting example above. It's interesting how helpful this kind of thing is for different disciplines.

Perhaps there has been some convergence towards microwave usability that I haven't experienced yet.

Microwave oven keypad controls are a terrible example: I've had some terrible troubles attempting to use ones that force you to set power level - half the time start isn't even obvious...

I bought one with a timer knob and a power knob that is mostly usable (but still poorly designed in some ways). Usable enough that I bought the same model for my parents. I would like the power level to be a slider not a digital knob, even though the knob is an improvement over a keypad.

Also connected: many composers would write out previous great works, to learn them more deeply. Bach as I recall would do this.

I too wanted to make this point. In art and designing, copying is how you learn and how you kick start your creativity and innovativeness.

My favorite quote that expresses this idea is from Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47: “Before attempting to create something new, it is vital to have a good appreciation of everything that already exists in this field.”

A good example of why this is true I see in my bubble is in Indie tabletop RPGs. Fairly regularly if you follow indie rpg websites and forums, you get the following "I am sick of how Dungeons and Dragons does X so I made a new system". They will then proceed to describe Dungeons and Dragons but with some half-baked idea that is already done in some other game. So you might say "Hey this is already done in Traveller". But the people who have extremely little exposure to the field, and have only ever played one game (D&D typically) ends up re-exploring the field with "new ideas" that have existed for decades and have already been iterated upon.

Cheat: "That's in GURPS. Uh huh, GURPS. Seen it: GURPS. Good idea, really nicely executed in GURPS. You'll like how GURPS did that." :-D

Oh Traveller! It has been such a long time since I thought about it. Have I still got those manuals, I wonder?

And then, if you are great, you will steal not from one thing but from everything

This sounds like the manifesto of an Andy Warhol LLM.

wE aRe aLl tHe aNdY wArHoL LlM

there is negative stealing or avoiding mistakes done by others. as propounded by Warren Buffet and others. and epitomized by philosophy of being less wrong.

In a similar vein, one of my favorite HN comments in the context of the modernist movement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27243252

(It feels very grumpy-old-man to complain about "low effort", but I think it's more culturally relevant than ever before...)

... not investigating your field is a massive low effort failure mode. You don't have to know your field, but you have to investigate it, appreciate it, draw upon it... even, or perhaps especially, if you're standing in opposition to it.

(This is also why "first principles" twits like Elon are so annoying...)

In a marketplace, this is theft. (Which, given this example is of a website for a for-profit product, seems appropriate.) In a community it's tradition. Building on traditions in a community (aka great artists steal) is different than trying to get yours in a marketplace. Art and community traditions aren't a competition until they are dragged into the marketplace.

This isn't stealing in the "good artists copy, great artists steal" sense. This is just straight copying/plagiarism.

To "steal" effectively (in the Steve Jobs sense) means to pull details into your own work that are invisible to the naked eye. E.g., I'm going to "steal" the concept for DuckDB's new quack protocol as inspiration for handling a similar issue in my own embedded DB. It will exist as its own implementation/code, but the central idea or "aha" is what's "stolen."

The original idea probably came from T.S. Eliot who said "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." Imitation is surface level, but stealing here means to take inspiration and make it your own, transformation.

Isn't the cost of this mimicry originality? Also, there may be a "cover up" and a weight to the conscience in that non-attribution too.

It's sort of like the whole idea of "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" but I've always thought, "why would you want your enemies close?" Would that involve deception? Do the enemies start off as friends until they become close and then there's a switch to loving the devil?

I saw a t-shirt once: "they can steal your style but not your originality." Gemini agreed. https://share.gemini.google/gA5aqbmA9AwO Gemini would know all about that. Gemini isn't the only one - the "creative fields" can be anything but. Checkout my page '2X' for ex_samples : https://future-secured.com/39599

I kind of agree in the sense that stealing a good idea and executing it well is a skill. Copying someones site "pixel by pixel" seems disrispectful though and I don't know what there's to be proud of.

Ask yourself why you feel that way, though. If I pixel-by-pixel copy discrete ideas from 20 different sites to build my own, that seems different, legit. Zero new code by me, I just stitched it together.

As we reduce 20, somehow that legitimacy erodes and at 1 it's "disrespectful". Where along that line was it wrong?

The "problem" we perceive is not stealing, it's stealing from only 1 place.

The sorites paradox says that removing a grain of sand from a heap doesn't stop it from being a heap, and yet we can do that until we are left with a single grain of sand which is clearly not a heap.

Likewise, taking elements from many influences and combining them involves a lot of creative choices about which pieces to take from which influence while copying one thing exactly involves no creative choices and is just reusing someone else's effort. It's the difference between baking someone a cake or getting one from the store.

Clearly the act of combining various elements into a coherent whole is the added value here. Like musicians which take various samples and sounds and combine them into something novel and harmonic

I spent about a year copying pg’s site: https://github.com/shawwn/pg

Result: https://shawwn.github.io/pg/

If you think it’s easy, it’s not. The closer you want it to be pixel perfect, the exponentially harder it is to get right.

https://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html

I’m very proud of it. I had to dig through decades-old viaweb templates to figure out which one he used.

In the age on LLMs it's definitely way easier than what you did.

No, it’s not. I used LLMs. It was still hard as fuck, and LLMs can’t actually help you when you’re trying to reproduce someone’s graphical design (specifically the pg buttons).

If you think it’s easy, or even possible without investing months, I invite you to try.

Okay, I stand corrected. Apologies for making the assumptions I did.

Why did you do this?

It was fun, and I like a challenge. I enjoy Lisp, and I retracing pg’s steps was gratifying.

Today most things are complex, and they don’t last very long. I wanted to pick apart something that’s lasted since the birth of the internet. Viaweb was, after all, the first web application.

> Viaweb was, after all, the first web application.

According to pg who is an unreliable narrator at the best of times.

I'd say Navisoft[0] might be a better candidate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaviSoft

[flagged]

Gosh hacker news is so disappointing nowadays. You show a project, you say hey, this is hard, I’m proud of it, and someone comes along and tells you that ackshually it was easy because you used a few prompts.

You have no idea. Try to redo what I did if you think it’s easy. No looking at my solutions either.

"You slopped it" should be bannable. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the author is wrong, it does nothing to further the conversation, and it’s a criticism that can be leveled at literally any project that isn’t concealing the fact that they’ve used AI when everyone uses AI now except for artisan work.

Go on, I dare you to try to redo what I did. You won’t even know where to start, since I had to buy a book from the 2000s on Viaweb and implement templates based on the contents. Now kindly leave me alone.

So many people on HN don't understand coding with AI at all. I honestly think they just haven't done it. AI does not take the grind out of coding. Plain and simple. I've been working on a project in the evening for months with AI. Yet there are people on HN that think one-shotting a pong game is the same thing.

This crosses into personal attack and is obviously against the site guidelines. You've been doing it in other threads too (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48223342). We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48678355 as well.

I thought the same at first, but they are copying somebody's old and retired design, ie the other company doesn't use that design anymore.

I've gone through my own cycle of this as a musician. Early in my music experience I was always obsessed with originality, and wouldn't learn a lot of existing pieces. At the stage I'm at now, I find great value in learning great songs and understanding why they work.

There is a lot of great work out there and if you are unwilling to be derivative in anyway, you'll intentionally avoid using and finding great things that others have discovered.

This is the way

It's taken me reaching my fifties and entering an entirely new career to realise this. That arrogance and ambition of youth, the hard-line unwillingness to compromise and study other people's work really held me back!

I remember working for a somewhat careless manager.. he just pointed at the chrome web dev store and said 'make it look like this'. I could have just copied everything wholesale but I actually handcrafted all the css, borrowing but generally using my own HTML structure, and js. The final result impressed even me. It made me feel.. if I worked on a team with real designers I could create something I would be proud of.

The key is stealing from multiple sources. Grab 3+ different sites that you really love and extract the elements that really resonate from each and meld them together into your own synthesis. Copying wholesale and tweaking a couple of things is lame IMO. That being said, pixel-perfect copywork is a fantastic exercise for improving your design skills.

Stealing is a source of flattery. I've had logos I've designed outright copied. Jokes on them: They discovered they could not copyright the mark and had to rebrand (again).

Stealing is stealing unless you're really good at it.

> However, it’s your job to go down the rabbit hole, learn the 100%, and sprinkle in your 3%.

I would say that there is a big difference between stealing without acknowledgement, and stealing with acknowledgement and actively learning through reverse engineering.

Very, and really very few things, especially in software engineering is novel or new. Everything is the same old concepts, repackaged, tweaked, renamed. Cyclical in nature, fads come and go.

Stealing in this context might be tad harsh.

Does this level of copying not imply a copyright infringement?

Even if not, it's really, really distasteful

Proudly admitting it in public seems foolish on both grounds.

There's a popular quote: "good artists copy, great artists steal". I've always interpreted "steal" in that context as taking a technique or an inspiration from something, but making it fully your own in your execution (in contrast to direct copying, where you have just made a reproduction).

Given that interpretation, taking someone else's website and changing 3% of it feels more like copying than stealing, even more so when you see the side by side comparison image and it looks completely the same. I love to take inspiration from all over the place, but I like to think I transform it more into my own vision than the author here. I think making a direct copy of something can sometimes be a good learning exercise in the right context, but I would follow it up with your own novel work that maybe uses some concepts you learned from that copying exercise.

As an aside: the current Mintlify marketing site, not the one copied in the article, reads to me as heavily inspired by Stripe's marketing website. Not as direct a copy as the article here though.

Wallace finds something more than just a design problem. Explaining how people think. We don't think in isolation. We think through mimesis (also known as copying).

When a child is learning language, they're not making up new sounds. They're just copying. When a musician learns jazz, they first write down the solos exactly as they are played, before improvising. When a scientist understands a proof, they work through it step-by-step, following the same steps as the person who first thought of it. Copying something isn't the same as thinking. It is thinking.

The people who move fastest aren't the ones who are trying to be the most original. They're the ones who've studied the old masters so well that their new ideas seem natural, not forced. They have copied so much that they can finally trust their instincts to break the pattern.

In this sense, stealing is the mental work of becoming, not just copying, but creating.

Isn't this essentially what LLMs do?

Others have said it, but I'm not a fan of the cookie cutter approach. Build on UX patterns that work, but try new things too. It'll be hard to let your brand infuse the design when you're doing a line for line reproduction.

When people finally offload 100% of their brain and forget how to use their creative reasoning abilities my guess is we’ll just all use Tailwind defaults across the board. No need to try new things, nobody will experiment because it’s so easy not to!

(Joking, mostly) but we did see this with Wordpress, Bootstrap, etc. the masses converge on simple web experiences because it’s pretty easy to get something that “just works”.

Only if you set the temperature at 0.

Otherwise you get the divinely inspired result of nvidia's PRNG implementation.

Technically, everything is stealing and everyone is stealing others work, you might use an open source software, might build your own but uses someone else’s libraries, might take someone’s UI design like OP, someone might use someone’s components, dig deeper and someone is using the icons to build components, dig deeper and someone’s is using a software with builtin tools trained to make similar icons to others, really, there’s no bottom to it. And if you decide to reinvent the whole wheel from the little details, you definitely will have so many bugs and issues, and most likely no one will likes it because it’s fundamentally different than how they are used to use XYZ.

I looked up stealing to ground this comment of mine:

> stealing: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice

I admire Ben for being so direct. I wonder why we fetishize, herbicide and normalize theft, even deception today. When did this become normal, and why draw the line at digital creation and not just allow theft of physical objects, too? (I mean I get the arguments about copying someones digital creation doesn't really mean you took what they had from them, you just made a copy, though this doesn't logically apply to if I also physically stole someones product and made a copy since copyright/patent protection likely applies)

the very point is that theft means you no longer have something since someone else has. copying is you still have it and someone else now too. there is no harm done by copying, except you actually believe that exclusivity as a separate concept is important to you. (debatable, I don't).

why not? I'm curious what you define as "property". Does property have to be physical?

For example if you felt your body and your mind was your property, if someone else copied your mind and was now profiting off of that without your consent, would you not feel that harmful to you?

If someone generated AI porn of me I'd certainly feel violated, among other things, but it's not stealing the same way as stealing my car so I can't get to work is. So it's not stealing, we need a different word. copyright infringement doesn't roll off the tongue though. 盗版 "doh baan" is Cantonese for pirated software/media. The original isn't easy to type, but daoban is.

Daoban might not ever enter western lexicon the same way tsunami or kowtow has, but stealing is just the wrong word to use.

Which words are you proposing work better for the scenarios in this article?

Daoban is the word I'm introducing from Cantonese.

> fetishize, herbicide and normalize

I’m very curious what “herbicide” was an auto-complete for here…

ChatGPT guesses "heroicize".

yes that was it.

    When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre,
    He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea;
    An' what he thought 'e might require,
    'E went an' took - the same as me!
    
    The market-girls an' fishermen,
    The shepherds an' the sailors, too,
    They 'eard old songs turn up again,
    But kep' it quiet - same as you!
    
    They knew 'e stole; 'e knew they knowed.
    They didn't tell, nor make a fuss,
    But winked at 'Omer down the road,
    An' 'e winked back - the same as us!
    
    - Rudyard Kipling

Good artists copy, great artists steal?

Still hurts to be the one being stolen from though.

there are only limited number of patterns for ui,ux, CTA. It sucks to be stolen from, but we build on top of each other most of the time

I'm a big fan of that quote, but always took it differently than the meaning associated with this article.

Good artists see an idea and use it. Great artists see an idea and _make it their own_.

I don't think this is the same kind of stealing?

If you're being a great artist who steals you may perfectly reproduce something, but in such a different and novel context that it feels fresh, or taking something verbatim and then modifying it with your work, vs say taking an series of ideas from a work and then not really changing or moving from what they were originally expressing

An example of this is from Offworld Trading Company[0], which literally started by copying the market from Age of Empires[1] and then iterated on it as well as the auction mechanics from MULE[2], I vaguely recall them talking about this in their GDC talk[3], though I could be misremembering that(it's a good talk though)

I could be wrong, but I'm not sure if anyone who was stolen from in those cases feels hurt by it

Compare that to stealing, where the parties stolen from were really quite angry at what was stolen, Triple Town vs Yeti Town[4], which very much looked like a lazy clone

-[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/271240/Offworld_Trading_C...

-[1]: https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Market_(Age_of_Empires_...

-[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.L.E.

-[3]: Offworld Trading Company: An RTS Without Guns : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2C4z_apu2I

-[4]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/spry-fox-and-the-clone-wars

This game slapped

These are solid conclusions/lessons to take away for people working in creative disciplines. Enforcing constraints on yourself can be rewarding and productive (the 3% rule), and forcing yourself to pay attention to other people's work is challenging but invaluable. Even less than stellar work has things to teach.

And can I just say, thank you for writing something you can read in five minutes. Incredibly grateful for someone who respects the reader by not dropping 3,000 words on them - easy though it may be.

Summing up the first line with 3 advices: increase your vulnerability, or increase: transparency, creativity, and reflection. My first thought is this guy lives in a healthy non-toxic environment. Here he comes up with "stealing is a skillset" because skillfully determining what to change is huge, and a major effort of the focused change.

But that ain't stealing. That is copying. And then twisting it per your desires. Real stealing steals just one or two elements.

Stealing is indeed a skill... and a sin (target missed) - by experience not good for soul. Knowing what laws in the countries where your business evolve allow someone to get inspired (as state of the art) or reuse freely from other's work in specific industry is a more valuable skill... and better for soul. One could move smarter and faster with light soul around if rules of the game are known and all opportunities are considered and not missed.

I think copying a website like this is very poor taste regardless. If I see you doing this, I immediately lose trust in your product and will immediately leave.

If you can't put the effort into the face of your product, how can I trust you to put effort into the product itself? Shitty behavior, with a shitty justification self-affirmation blogpost.

I agree. It's telling that they picked such a boring and generic design to steal.

I think the author's choice of words is framing the discussion. They did build their own website, but they loved the look of the one they saw, so I'd think a better choice would be "inspired by" rather than "stolen from."

> At the beginning of my career, I believed I’d be rewarded for the originality of my ideas. The truth is that you’re rewarded for identifying and solving problems efficiently.

The "I'll be original and get directly rewarded" vision is indeed naive.

However, sometimes you get to a point in which you design original ideas precisely so they will be stolen, and making that work for you is part of the design.

I'm a fan of stealing as well, but I normally try to steal from a variety of sources. If you just copy a painting or novel and barely change anything, you're not an artist. But if you copy dozens of works from a variety of your favorite inspirations, at the end you are left with something recognizable, yet wholly new, and your own.

And we wonder why everything is so unbearably boring & bland...

That comparison is quite the stretch imo, this feels more like copying homework. And if we are honest about what is being sold here: normalization of stealing other peoples work with AI and pretending you are a smarter, better person for it.

Would've been pretty dire if the original firestarter accused other humans of theft.

I just struggle to care about people complaining about 'ideas being stolen'. Make it, or don't, it really doesn't bother me.

Lots of people who pretend to be ostriches. :DDD And the really, really sad thing is that they can't even steal proper things, they steal the shit. Just like when yters and tiktokkers copy every stupid thing from each other, without thinking about it for 3 seconds. Total decline.

Actual stealing is an even more impressive skill. Usually involves intensively trained sleight of hand, elaborate ruses, a very good understanding of theory of mind regarding the victim's attention, and planned deescalation paths in case you're caught.

This is copying, not stealing. Stealing means taking someone else's ideas, not their final output.

Copying creates trends, where everything looks and feels the same. Stealing an idea and creating something of your own, AKA remixing, is a much more valuable skill.

You have to copy before you can surpass. That's how every craft works. Painting, music, writing, code. You internalize the patterns first, then you start breaking them on purpose.

“Stealing is a skill” is catchy but doesn’t express the underlying concept as well as your other principles. I would suggest “learn by copying good things”, or “quality work is where you find it” or something to that effect.

This feels wrong.

Yeah, this is kinda crazy. This isn't stealing some ideas, their website is a printscreen of the original with some colors shifted. I doubt this is even legal.

Off-topic; but the nerd in me complained:

In GURPS, stealing is two skills: filch and pickpocket.

Whoa, I just mentioned GURPS in a completely different context in this very comment thread. :explodinghead:

"It was around January 2020. I became the head coach of a youth basketball team.

I was a few months into my first job out of college, and I was feeling… empty"

no wonder... i d be feeling empty too if copying was my job

Everything is a REMIX https://youtu.be/X9RYuvPCQUA?si=W64XCy3RDiL2l80z

while the article may be making the process sound more meaningful than it actually is, I think there's a definite benefit to learning by trying to copy others, then making tweaks as you go. Honestly, it can be quite interesting to code your own version of a tool you plan to use, then compare the code to the original to see how you both handled things differently. Or to just look at a random website/app/footage of the same and try to figure out how everything works there.

The Tim Ferris school of thought. Can’t say I agree with it.

Stealing isn't a skill. Finding a way to not be held accountable for stealing is a skill. That's why lawyers charge so much.

It's stealing when copyright is infringed and when the stealing part is not acknowledged. Otherwise, can we called it "inspired by"?

No, that's just copyright infringement. It's stealing when the stolen thing is no longer accessible to the previous owner.

Consensus differs on whether both, or just one, is morally objectionable. Conflating them is problematic.

Agreed. Copying pixel by pixel feels wrong and also not very creative.

There is something of a tradition in the design world to use theft-shaped words for things we collect for inspiration/ideas. A piece of advice I followed in the 80s and 90s when paper was still a thing was to have a "Swipe File," which was a collection of things you saw and liked, on paper.

In my own case as a designer of desktop apps, my Swipe File was not just digital screen shots of parts of apps that I admired, but I physically printed them out as well so I could spread them on a desk, floor, and walls when brainstorming.

That word "Swipe" also inspired the name of a design store catering to creative professionals in my home town, Toronto:

https://www.swipe.com/about

What do you do if your version becomes immensely more popular and successful then the thing you copied? When people start calling you a genius.

Don't do this. It's really a terrible idea. He's comparing Virgil Abloh being asked to create an evolution of the Air Force 1 and blatantly ripping off an already boring website (and in the same product category, no less). The two have nothing in common, obviously. You should build your own identity, and you do this by understanding your customers. If you want to create a boring copy of already existing work, well that's what we have LLMs for.

That said, we all take influence from the work of others who we admire. If you're going to steal, take the parts you like best from 10 different projects, improve every single one, and recombine them in a new way. That's how artists "steal".

This is only 3% originality and 97% theft. That's 3% unrealized profits.

Look into Yellowism: one signature and its 100% yours.

Person learns the idea that being unethical pays of sometimes. And therefore, ethics don't matter.

Good artists copy, great artists steal. but this article doesn't seem to be about that.

– when you get it wrong, people treat you with the contempt they reserve for a thief.

Mintlify "stole" their latest design off Stripe. It's very obvious.

Good artists copy, great artists steal, plagiarists copy and paste CSS wholesale

Most great products are nothing, but well-timed and well-executed stolen ideas.

and this is why artists get up in arms about AI is because they know they are guilty of stealing and that all of their work is largely just inspirations upon inspirations and now they have to compete with AI

It reminds me of this old country song:

    No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun
    It's never what you do, but how it's done
    What you base your happiness around? Material, women, and large paper
    That means you inferior, not major
    No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun
    It's never what you do, but how it's done
    What you base your happiness around? Material, women, and large paper
    That means you inferior, not major

I find this despicable. Of course, recreate something to understand it better, learn from it, or just if you like it (there's plenty of songs I play because it's a fun song to play, or really nice to listen to).

But the intention to blatantly copy and then pass off as your own, that is just bereft of creativity.

Well, I have level 99 Thieving on RuneScape

Good artists copy. Great artists steal.

Plagiarists also steal.

In UI they call that "Affordance"

"Yes your honor, I copied it pixel-by-pixel."

Anything for a buck!

I spent way too much time trying to figure out if this is satire. I'm pretty sure it's not.

This is what we've come to as a society? Completely given up on creativity and skill for literally while talking up the joys of stealing.

OK, Benjamin.

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