Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us | Hacker News Reader

Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us

wired.com

68 pointsjohns38 comments

Help me understand: is it a terrible problem to design one website so that it looks similar to another website, but not a terrible problem to reproduce a copyrighted musical recording and share it with your friends? I'm trying to figure out what the general principle of fairness (or morality) is here.

I'm no fan of copyright. But in the case of music, unless we're talking about sampling or covering or remixing, then the reproduction is verbatim. Possibly bit-for-bit. This cannot happen with a website, as there are too many components: design, layout and artwork; back-end implementation; server architecture; business processes; staff; management; customer service and public relations... You can't be a "bit-for-bit" copy of Kayak's business. You can only be an also-ran or a better Kayak.

File sharers don't directly compete against musicians the way bing travel competes with Kayak. I would say the closer comparison is instead of remixing/sampling a popular band you just release their song on your own album.

I don't understand or intend to comment on any of the legal aspects of this dispute, but as far as morality goes, Bing travel looks like a clone of Kayak with a different logo, and that doesn't feel fair to me.

It's a shame people are downvoting this rather than answering it. It's a good question, and certainly within the scope of this article and HN.

Musical works classically fall squarely within the type of protection copyright was designed to afford, the stated goal being to promote creative expression.

Interface designs, though, do not. The problem with claims alleging infringement of designs is that a party may, if courts are not careful, be given what is effectively a monopoly on an idea (Apple tried to get away with this in the early 1980s by claiming that its iconic depictions of common office items were protected by copyright).

In any case, this is not the place to get into legal technicalities but simply to point out (in answer to your question) that the principle of fairness embodied in the copyright laws is to protect original expression (such as is embodied in musical works) while not setting up arbitrary barriers to originality (such as would happen if a someone were allowed to corner exclusive rights on common ideas such as how an interface might be designed).

Thus, the type of case that might be brought against Microsoft is actually a tough one. It can be won but the showing that needs to be made has to be very strong.

I understand that there is a philosophical argument against the very idea of copyright, and the issues are exacerbated in our era of intense inter-connectivity, but the above sets forth the key principles as the existing copyright laws seek to uphold them.

The culture isn't (completely) homogeneous here. The people saying it's bad to rip off web sites aren't necessarily the same people saying it's ok copy mp3s.

I would imagine that many people believe that the morality of stealing depends on who you're stealing from. Additionally, many probably don't consider it theft if there isn't an immediately apparent victim.

"Who you're stealing from" is a bad argument for (or against) piracy. The only sound (pun intended) argument for piracy that I know of is the fact that intellectual property laws are fundamentally a bunch of crap.

Sharing an mp3 is dramatically different from designing a similar website.

When I give a song to my friend, its like I put a website in an iframe. The whole site is still there, attributed to the website's owner, the owner just doesn't get money for it.

When I make a design that looks eerily similar to someone else's, I am trying to pass it off as my own. That's plagiarism, and that is the line that is more morally reprehensible because of the implicit deceit.

That's not to say that infringing on someone else's property is not wrong, but infringing with deceit is IMO much worse than infringing without deceit.

Personally I wouldn't do either. But I think a lot of people feel a line is crossed when you make money by copying someone else's work, as opposed to making copies for free (and for personal use).

That's maybe an accurate depiction of what you'd get from the community if you put it to a vote, but it wouldn't be anywhere near unanimous. I personally tend to go the other way. Copying a website is like a band doing a cover version of a song.

Bing and Kayak both use the same underlying (third party) database.

Furthermore, Kayak is a clone of Fly.com's design, so Kayak really has no ground to argue about Bing allegedly copying them.

Um, fly.com launched 4 months ago. Kayak has been around for several years. I.e. you have it exactly backwards. In addition the comment about the same underlying database is a gross simplification. While ITA software aggregates a bunch of government mandated databases, both Kayak and Bing get data from other sources.

No, the musical counterpart would be performing someone else's song and claiming you wrote it.

Plagiarism != copyright infringement.

We had a discussion about this weeks ago, pointing out that Microsoft bought Farecast who had similar site design. But it's interesting to see it just now burbling up to the top elsewhere.

I love HN, I learn / find more sooner than through so many other outlets.

Here's the previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=642023

As much as I like to bash M$, this time M$ is not to blame... If anyone it's Farecast...

If Microsoft owns Farecast, they are in fact ultimately responsible. That's what ownership means.

Hmmm... Every price search site has a similar layout and ajax navigation these days. I can name you at least 2 -> wego.com / lessno.com

Just an interesting note:

Kayak was founded in 2004. FareCast was founded in 2003.

I don't know when either site launched or iterated to their current base design, but even before Microsoft bought FareCast, it looked exactly like Kayak. I actually thought they were powered by the same company. It looked like this in the past: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/f/f2/200906... That was still pretty close (although it's more obvious now).

Sometimes there's only so many ways to skin a cat, art is very much an influential process and converging ideas are common. I can dig up PRINT and INTERACTIVE magazines from the 90-00's and show you plenty of designs that have been "copied" a million times over.

http://images.colinanawaty.com/screenshots/5b629b77aa8a247c3...

If Kayak thinks their design is so original, maybe they should check out eBay's two column layout; filters on the left, content in the middle. Unless MS copied code and a VERYYYY unique approach to UI, this is a weak case that should be thrown out, IMO. Notice too that the screenshot in the WIRED article uses the EXACT same search data so it's even more suggestive that Microsoft copied Kayak. Controversy brings eye balls...

Even if kayak loses the court battle, the amount of free PR they get from suing far outweighs the cost of the lawyers.

I think that bing will get even more free PR

I really like Kayak and the team that runs that company, I've had several interactions with them, all of them positive. And I wish them the best in resolving this.

(One of these interactions was suggesting that they they make CNAME so that the URL "moc.kayak.com" would resolve, so they did.)

In my opinion, kayak is in trouble. They're grossly overcapitalized (~ $200 million in investments) and are watching their product being commoditized. Resorting to lawyers is a classic reaction to that problem.

200 mil?

It's funny because I built an effective copy of the site a while back.

Maybe I should put up instructions and open source it.

One significantly better feature about Bing is that it doesn't have any "compare to x in another window" boxes checked by default. I switched from Kayak to Mobissimo because of that (despite the fact that their name is so annoyingly hard to remember that I kept inadvertantly going back to Kayak) and unfortunately Mobissimo eventually checked some boxes by default too. So now I'll use Bing.

That's because there is significant income in the popups generated by those checkboxes. But hopefully bing is leading the way in making them disappear.

I feel for Kayak. I used to get so angry when I'd catch a competitor blatantly ripping us off. Once I had to call a company's CEO and bitch at him about it (to which he completely denied any similarity between our sites and continues to ride our coattails). In the end, you just learn to deal with it because if you're better you'll usually stay on top regardless of how much of your talent they attempt to siphon. That's also why I stopped having a heart attack every time I'd post a blog entry just to have it slurped up by a dozen spam sites.

Though in this case, if Microsoft (or whoever down the chain is developing this site) were blatantly ripping off my design I’d PISSED OFF TO NO END. They have way more money for marketing. ;)

"Stop copying me" belongs back in elementary school, along with "I'm rubber and you're glue" and "Nanny-nanny boo-boo."

Fortunately US judges seem to have graduated from elementary school, and they have pretty much smacked down look-and-feel lawsuits every time they've come up: Apple versus Microsoft, Lotus versus Borland, etc.

You do realize that's a headline right?

Yes, but I read the article too, and it seems like an adequate characterization of the C&D and the conflict, as far as the article describes it.

Heh this site design is used by nearly every travel site and flights company, I doubt Kayak have much of a claim to it.

And just about every product company. Newegg is not far off. Left column to modify your selection, right column to list products.

Kayak can cry foul all they want but there is nothing stopping MS or anyone else from copying the site design.

It is a shame that MS could not come up with anything more usable, original and innovative.

(I am avoiding blanket statements such as 'they haven't done anything innovative since xx)

You're right, nothing is stopping them. But people that rip off layouts are extremely lame and I'm glad that Kayak is complaining about it. Why is such a big company making these amateur moves?

Given the available research on consumer behaviour and given the available data on website popularity, isn't it to be expected that websites in a certain segement will start to resemble each other more and more, as they converge towards an optimally consumerfriendly design?

As the recent Coldplay - Cat Stevens - Joe Satriani love triangle shows: it isn't just website design. By now, the amount of output in any kind of creative activity is so large that there is inevitable overlap. When the output is filtered by the selection criterion of 'what the average human (in Western civilization) likes', chances of similar designs surviving becomes even larger. It would be more surprising if this didn't happen.

This is interesting for entrepeneurs, in that you shouldn't be discouraged by ideas and 'designs' similar to yours popping up everywhere. It's inevitable and it's the details in the execution (or the fact that you are executing it at all) that matters.

It does look like somebody at Microsoft fired up Firefox/Firebug and had a copy-and-paste party.

The fact that someone is complaining over a service Microsoft is offering rather than ignoring it shows that they have indeed done something well with bing.

Now if they would only expand on their localization efforts so I could actually take advantage of this.

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