How Email On Acid stole our work | Hacker News Reader

How Email On Acid stole our work

stampready.net

62 pointsf4stjack61 comments

I'm not going to comment on wether I believe the infringement claim or not, but let's have a look at the way they calculate damage - it's the same way the music companies calculate damages for illegal downloading: They take a number with questionable origin (27 commenters), multiply it by a factor that appears from thin air (assume 1 of 50 downloaders commented) and then pretend that everyone of these would have bought the template and next thing assume that's the low-ball figure. Given that per their own claim the template sold 361 times in half a year I find it hard to believe that there was a sudden rush of I-Must-Have-This-Template.

This "I'll just conjure a number" method of claiming inflated damages just ruins the credibility of the whole post for me.

When a big emotional upset is involved, it is important to separate the faulty math from the real evidence. They could claim millions of dollars in loss and it still wouldn't change the fact that they were stolen from.

So would you agree that the exorbitant losses the media industries claim is excusable, since their IP is also being stolen?

EDIT: I apologize for going against the popular opinion on HN.

Two conclusions you could have come to here:

A. "Ah, I've brought up a politically charged tangent and people are downvoting to keep the discussion on topic"

B. "I'm a martyr to the HN hivemind!"

Yeah, definitely the second one.

Saying that:

This silly algorithm for calculating damages is irrelevant to this claim of theft,

is not the same as saying:

All claims of theft from everyone who uses this silly algorithm for calculating damages are equally true or untrue.

Apologize for the failure in reasoning and the passive-aggressiveness instead.

See, I consider their case weak at best.

The template is nice, but I've seen templates like that before. It's clean and well done, but to be honest, it's not that unique either. That little ribbon on the dark background - I have that on my website. The class "plusIcon", I probably used all possible permutations of "plus-icon", "plusIcon", "plus_icon", ... somewhere over the last couple of years. The color is the same, but hey, the number of colors is somewhat limited. And then the html differs as well if you really look at it. The CSS differs significantly.

EmailOnAcid acknowledge the inspiration they used for a mostly educational article, and promised to change the design in the article. Now that could have been a peacefully and entirely fair resolution for the problem. Another option might have been for EmailOnAcid to acknowledge the inspiration and link back, offering the opportunity to rack up some sales to offset the damage.

But now the case has been blown out of proportion - they created a new blog to post this entry(!). I understand the feeling of rage, but that's not a good mood to write a blog article. And for me, personally, stampready just lost out. I'm not going to buy from a company that goes ballistic at the first possible opportunity - I prefer to deal with professionals.

While I agree that the "lost income" argument is bunk, it's pretty clear that the code was copied. The number of excessive whitespace after a line of HTML is not something you get "inspired" by, it's something you copypaste.

Or something that happens by accident. I fully agree with you that it's probable that the HTML was copied, but it was substantially altered in any case. And I must admit that that's a crime that I'm guilty of as well and I doubt that there's any web developer out there that never did something alike, just as there is no designer out there that never copied an arrow-icon.

My point is that the whole article smells of "we wanted to be insulted", name calling and call to action included. Writing a blog article to call out copying is the nuclear option, setting up a blog and writing a single article, just to play the nuclear option is just not warranted over such a minor case.

They mention a single space on a single line. Which, in the "stolen" version has removed the width=100%. Their evidence is not very good, and could even point in the opposite direction. Notice the different layout at the bottom (two lines of text instead of one centered), yet they call it "identical". Notice the extra classes added in the stolen version.

As far as an extra space, it seems very plausible that whatever editing process resulted in a single extra space at the end of a line could have happened to two developers. I know in my own code, and I'm usually very careful, sometimes I end up with extra spaces that I only catch via diffs. If the "typo" had been something like "plu_s_icon", that'd be much stronger evidence.

The result is much like you'd expect for someone copying the design (i.e., looking at the template and saying "we can do that"). It's possible someone did copypaste it, then changed the HTML and CSS, but that isn't what they're claiming.

They were not stolen from. If you have a thing and I copy the thing, it is not stealing. Copyright infringement, piracy, loss of theoretical sales, perhaps yes.

I'm only saying this because your entire point is about being pedantic with the language, one of the definitions of steal[0] is "to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment." In this case, whether its a copy or not is immaterial. I've seen a bunch of people parroting the line that if you're not taking a tangible thing you're not stealing. This is plainly false both by connotation and denotation.

0: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/steal

They should consider the % who look at their template and don't purchase (I do this all the time on ThemeForest). Apply that percentage to their imaginary number (nothing spectacular about it, so I'll guess 1%?) Email on Acid should send them a check for $200 and call it a day.

In your account, the funniest part is when the people from emailonacid explain to you that they have developed this theme with "tricks" that they have learned.

The only trick they are learning is borrowing other peoples code. In their minds they have done enough to change the content so it is not plagiarized or stolen. Seems like their definition of original is copy and paste into a blank text editor and then change the content. I think to them, they haven't copied you at all.

I am interested in these stories because for me anytime I build a website I do it based on the design from another website or two that I like. Usually I do copy some amount of code, but it has helped me to learn a crap ton about web development and design. With that said I have come across parts of javascript that will check what site is running it. It's interesting, but looks like you need to do a little more safe guarding.

This is a case of potential piracy, but it isn't theft. And it isn't 'over $20,000'. If would have been over $20,000 if the number of downloaders that the author guessed downloaded the pirated version would have definitely been going to pay for the paid version, but of course that's not true. Call it what it is, and by all means get mad about it, but don't call someone a thief when they're at worst a pirate and don't pretend pirated downloads equate to lost sales.

That would be the case if stampready were selling it and emailonacid were giving it away for free.

Instead, Stamp Ready is a mac app which sells for about $30. Emailonacid is a subscription based service that goes for free to $70/month.

Neither simply offer the theme on its own. Both require some sort of purchase or subscription at which point the theme is made available.

That said, I agree that it can't really be considered lost sales. If I wanted to use StampReady I can't in general because I don't have easy access to a Mac, and the only build they have is a mac app.

Likewise, without this blog post, there is no way for me to know that either stampready or emailonacid host that theme. Neither of them advertise it on their site. I wouldn't ever choose one over the other because of the existence of that theme; I don't even know it's there until I've already got a subscription to one of them. In that way it's even more ephemeral.

I mean, sure, there is IP theft going on, but the actual impact is really hard to gauge. You're not losing customers; you're not losing sales. You're providing the other company with some marginal perceived value that they didn't have to put the same effort into building.

However, the most ironic thing about this is: without your blog post, I didn't know about emailonacid. It's actually a service that I haven't investigated and looks like it can solve some issues I've had with other mailing services. I can't make user of StampReady as I said because of the limitations of being a mac app.

I can't say I'm going to use emailonacid, but you've definitely increased my awareness of the brand, and provided an amount of free advertising that I would have never got before. I've hunted around their site looking for evidence of that theme and actually got a bunch of information about them.

If this was a ploy to advertise for them, then it worked very well. If not, then I think it was very counterproductive.

The claimed original work sells as a template separately from the (optional, Mac-only) StampReady app.

  > This is a case of potential piracy...

I think you're correct. As I understand it, one can not legally protect a page layout. (Imagine how difficult it would be to publish a book if people could protect things like "black times roman typeface on white background with one inch borders.") The description of a layout to a computer can be copyrighted as a form of expression, so one can copyright their specific CSS description of a page layout. It's interesting to note that the benefits of even this form of copyright protection is contentious: If a layout can only practically be expressed to the computer in a few different ways, then the odds of accidental infringement are very high.

This article reinforces my opinion that the business of selling templates is a foolish one.

1. The price for templates has been diluted to comical levels.

2. Site design is an integral part that needs proper investment. Clients who invest a double digit budget into the design of their website are clients that you really, really don't want.

3. In most cases, templates are used as a start - since most websites need customization, the templates your sell will quickly become different from what you sold.

4. Likewise, if you pay 20 bucks for a template and then modify it to your site, the quality of the result is often about as good as if you had taken a free one and modified that.

5. The only good business models I've seen around templates are the sites who try to use the "buy in cheaply" model to get clients to something more sensible - where the provider ends up becoming a go-to cornerstone for design.

All this creates a thievish market that is bound to produce exactly the kind of situation we've read about in this blog post: Some people are douchebags who steal, some people are douchebags who whine about it in public.

Sorry, no sympathy. Not a reasonable market. If you set up shop in a hornets nest, expect to get stung.

That's far from true. Many end-users don't need to make significant changes. We've used a few themes successfully.

As an Android App developer, we don't even need a website - we just keep one up for our blog and basic product info. 90% of our communication goes through our apps & Gmail.

> That's far from true. Many

That appears to be a contradiction.

Furthermore: I'm a developer for software that is mostly used by people making their own website or by service providers who use software like mine and templates to build websites for clients. So I think the impression I got out of that is a little more precise than your N=1 impression.

Or I could just look at the site. One theme sold > 22k copies:

http://themeforest.net/item/avada-responsive-multipurpose-th...

You saying 22k-1 were all changed by service providers? Unlikely.

Well, I suppose I should quote the page you linked to:

> 23 Layered PSD’s for customization

I guess at 22k copies, they probably have a good reason to include those.

Actually, I can make a pretty good (and I think, educated) guess at what that reason is: Because people have been bugging them about including psd's day in and day out. Trust me, it is very, very rare that I see an untouched template.

Some damning evidence you've shown. One small suggestion I would make is to compare the md5 hashes of the images. Obviously they appear to be the same as per the evidence you've shown, but I would see that as extra convincing.

I see only a handful of people have pressed the tweet button. Hopefully the front page of hacker news is a welcome bit of exposure that you weren't expecting ;)

Now the question is: Will email on acid man up? Or should you lawyer up?

If emailonacid's explanation is correct, they were "inspired" and wrote their own HTML and CSS. They could have easily designed the same image.

Given the pixel dimensions of a triangle, and the same software, should we expect the antialiasing or JPEG compression to be unequal? I'd be interesting in knowing which part of, say, Photoshop, adds randomness to such a deterministic process.

Now if there's EXIF data with timestamps or names, sure, good evidence. But this post seems like they're really stretching the "evidence". It's still very plausible that the other company looked at things, perhaps took some pixel measurements, and "recreated" it.

Edit: Also, check out where that triangle is used. The three images beneath it are very differently aligned. By their level of evidence, this disproves their point.

I'm surprised how HN is so uncritical in evaluating evidence and alternative explanations.

Yes but notice the mistakes the developer made when adding extraneous whitespace. Also the use of the same class names. At the very least some of the code was copied verbatim without attribution.

A single space at the end of a line? That's extremely common. I don't catch those until I check my diffs before commit. And on that particular line, the width attribute was "removed".

And the class name is "plusIcon", which has to be extremely common.

While it certainly looks like they might have copied the design, the evidence they provided is extremely flimsy and doesn't point to them copying the HTML or CSS.

A triangle of exactly the same height and width and at exactly the same anti-aliasing and exactly the same jpeg compression. Have you heard of Occam's Razor?

Given the exact coordinates of the triangle, antialiasing and jpeg should be identical.

Well, Email On Acid appear to have removed the blog post already.

Google Cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

It's back up with this update:

"May 27, 2012 Update: It has come to our attention that the original layout for our responsive template was being sold on Themeforest. We are truly sorry for any misunderstanding or misappropriation of content. We would like our readers to know that we had written all CSS on our own (which is the power behind responsive design) and our intention was only to share in those findings. As we stated in our response to the notification we had agreed to redesign the layout of our template so it does not match the layout of their template. We are currently in the process of updating the template and should be available shortly."

Heh, they really did date it 2012.

Wait, wasn't the discussion about Wordpress themes having to be GPL (being purely derivative works) over and done years ago?

You create a derivative work of GPL-ed software and call somebody else a thief for doing the same to you?

The claimed original work here is not a WordPress theme.

"Our template has as we speak been sold a 361 times within half a year and it's still increasing. Themeforest rated our template worth a $17."

Yes it is. Which basically means the author is refusing to acknowledge the copyright of the WordPress authors and the license rights of the ones he's calling thieves.

There's one pirate here, and it's StampReady.

Also, I think Email on Acid have a good case for libel. This is willful public defamation.

Edit: Apparently, I'm wrong about this being a WordPress theme. My apologies.

Where is your evidence that it's a WordPress-related template? Here is the ThemeForest page for the claimed original work from StampReady:

http://themeforest.net/item/the-talk-responsive-email-templa...

It appears under the 'email templates' section. The only place the string 'WordPress' appears on that page is in top navigation (to a different section). The template is described as being compatible with, among other things: Mailchimp, Gmail, Thunderbird, and Outlook. It's not described as interacting with WordPress in any way.

You're making nasty allegations of bad-faith based on an erroneous assumption -- that this is a template for WordPress or derived from WordPress. There are other kinds of templates sold on ThemeForest!

Unless you can provide evidence that StampReady's email template 'The Talk' is derived from WordPress, you should apologize to StampReady and/or delete the allegations against StampReady of piracy, 'libel', and 'willful public defamation' in your latest comment.

You seem stuck on the idea that it's a WordPress theme. It is not. The theme (linked from the article):

http://themeforest.net/item/the-talk-responsive-email-templa...

It's a responsive email template. Not a WordPress template. None of your proselytizing about WP themes and the GPL is applicable to this situation.

Stamp Ready, I like how you could only cite 2 lines out of 1,000. If I had 10K for every line of code I write, it'd be a millionaire. You should probably share the entire source if you are making this type of accusation.

You said it yourself, you sold that ribbon image 300+ times, it is now circulated on the internet and there is no way to prove it came from your IP address.

Out of curiosity, did you obtain rights to profit from the art used in your template? Did you take a screenshot or just RT click?

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/01/06/freebie-gemicon-i...

http://www.colorproprint.com/blog/design-freebies-brushes-fo...

http://dribbble.com/shots/676411-Free-Vintage-Icon-Set-gif

I believe it clearly states the following on dribbble.com:

Welcome to the hornet's nest. Slander is never the best option but judging from your tweets over the past 3 months, this is not your first time.

I'm sorry to all the people who disagree with this but theft is theft.

Imagine you spent your time building something this elegant just for a bigger company to rip it off, and for them to reply with "oh it may look the same but we just used your template as "inspiration" and changed a few images." is pretty much an insult.

The only thing I don't agree with is that you can't price how much they would have lost, only estimate, and $20,000 is way over the top.

Theft is taking something away from someone. Since EmailOnAcid didn't take OP's "possession" of the original template, therefore no theft has taken place.

What has allegedly happened is that a copy was made without permission. A violation of copyright law, much different than actual theft.

Ah so what you are saying is that if there is no victim and it's not stealing then it's ok?

I think you know quite well that this is not what xordon is saying at all. Whenever something like this happens, people throw words like "theft" and "stolen" around. This widespread conflation of stealing and copyright infringement is the deliberate outcome of a long-running effort by the copyright lobby. Reminding each other of the difference is healthy for the long-term balance of power between the general public and rights-holders.

sorry to hear. i feel sorry for you guys because you have to fight someone stealing your work + waste time and resources chasing these people. on your website though, i noticed something I couldn't overlook (screenshot in link). you have also copied xcode's icon no?

http://cl.ly/image/2a412E0B0d3G

Hi, just for clarification I am not affiliated with stampready and/or email on acid. Saw that, found it interesting and wanted to share. And there were quotation marks around the title when I posted, wonder why they disappeared?

edit: holy hell, whole title is edited! Original title was: "How Email On Acid stole worth over $20.000."

HN often automatically changes submission titles to the title of the submitted article. It prevents editorializing, although sometimes it leads to confusion.

But I submitted it with its original title. sigh

The original title doesn't make sense. So many typos on their page too. Can't even spell internet properly in the screenshot. Gross.

But current title gives a wrong sense. I am not working with stampready nor their theme is my work. The title, now, suggests it so.

It's quite obviously stolen. I'm surprised they didn't throw the sha sums of the images into the article for good measure.

$20k in damages is an exaggeration. It's not like stampready would have received an extra $20k in revenue if Email On Acid didn't exist. Sounds like Lawyer math to me.

On the other hand, if I'm researching companies, and see a small one trying to sell me something a bigger one is giving for free i just consider them scamers and move on.

How do you calculate the loss of sales for cases like this?

Edit: ...and this argument is totally invalid for what zeidrich said.

Where's the line between something being "stolen" and something being "inspired" by something else?

People say that as soon as you "copy and paste" a line of code that isn't yours, you're stealing. But it seems that without the "copying and pasting" that is inherent, not only in the learning process, but often in the process of innovation itself, we wouldn't have the products we have today.

And what's the difference between copying and pasting something and creating something similar, but not an exact copy with similar code that you viewed and then re-typed in a similar way? Can one be outright theft and the other be acceptable?

So, if they can prove it, why not sue them?

Assuming the $20,000 claim has some basis, it's borderline not---actually probably not---worth pursuing. Bigger than a "small claim" and legal fees will cost you more than that to actually get in front of a judge.

"Even the typo's" :-)

same thing happened to our site design. We felt flattered rather than mad, but our business isn't selling templates. Sorry man. https://keen.io/blog/46309336554/the-highest-form-of-flatter...

It's obvious that whoever designed Email on Acid has never taken any good acid.

Looks like someone stole a noun from their post title too. Crazy stuff.

And he seems rather eager to expend his company.

maybe a root-kit would have helped to prevent that.

awful stuff.. good job calling them on it...

If this is the downside of having a DRM-less, open web then so be it.

Isn't it the case that anyone who has purchased this template and uses it on their site that someone can then scrape the template? The source code is already out there. You're fighting the medium not the man.

I cannot for the life of me understand why this was down-voted. I think it points out why this kind of thing falls into a gray area that should really be addressed in a completely different way than I see the conversation falling here on HN.

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