Update: The site that was stealing content has removed their post, although I did not get any sort of reply email. And to the people that were emailing me from Web Design Tuts with those dirty messages – it was other people stealing WDT content, not the other way around 
Second Update: The site owner has kindly emailed me and apologized for what happened. The article was removed and no harm was done. I will keep this post up as a way to help deter future content thieves. Look everyone, if you’re going to take content, at least don’t steal someone’s bandwidth, and it never hurts to give a credit link. We all make mistakes, but hopefully this will prevent some from happening down the road.
Today I received an email from a reader of Web Design Tuts informing me that someone had republished one my first tutorials on another site. I checked it out, and there it was – my six hours, and 2,000 words of work. I scrolled the page looking for any kind of link or credit to WDT, none. I soon realized that they were even grabbing the images right off of my server, thus taking up my bandwidth!
And THIS, my good people, is why you should NEVER steal online content. I have emailed them and left a comment asking for them to kindly remove the tutorial. Until they do, their readers will see what they have done.
I realize that this happens every day online, but listen everyone: the internet is a community. As bloggers especially, we need to work together to build better websites and put together better content. Stealing is never the right way to go about doing this.
madeinmundo
January 16, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Great Work Brian! Brilliant!
Paul
January 16, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Haha, good job!
Dustin Brewer
January 16, 2009 at 5:54 pm
That is hilarious. David Airey did the same thing not to long ago to another thief. http://www.davidairey.com/stop-image-theft-hotlinking-htaccess/
It is funny that the offending site is called “ShareGraphics,” maybe the name of their site is more than just a name.
kat
January 16, 2009 at 5:57 pm
lol. I love it!
Chris
January 16, 2009 at 6:02 pm
So what exactly did you do about this? Your post doesn’t say.
Brian
January 16, 2009 at 6:09 pm
@Chris:
Well since they were grabbing the URL’s of the images right from my server, all I had to do was upload a new image to my server with the same name and delete the old ones. Their site automatically grabbed the new images.
I guess David’s article, linked to above, has a better method, but this worked just fine for me
Dustin Brewer
January 16, 2009 at 6:10 pm
@Brian:
If you look at David’s post you will see a way to do it even if you don’t notice someone stealing your images using htaccess.
Josh
January 16, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Chris, click on the link in the post. You’ll see what he did.
Brian
January 16, 2009 at 6:17 pm
@Dustin Brewer:
Yea, I need to take a look at that, thanks for the heads up!
Jorge Landa
January 16, 2009 at 6:17 pm
I wouldn’t have been so gentle =P
kenroy george
January 16, 2009 at 6:25 pm
that is beautiful! pure genius!
kenroy
Joni Mueller
January 16, 2009 at 7:14 pm
And the disclaimer on their site is PRICELESS:
“We do not allow any warez and/or other illegal content like uncopyrighted movies, musics, … “
James NomadRip
January 16, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Excellent! I too love the “disclaimer”.
Cameron
January 16, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Brian, awesome!
haha not sure when you noticed it, but the images are STILL up lol!
You should post random stuff.. and just go to town, hehe
NetOperator Wibby
January 16, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Priceless. Wahahahahaha, this is too awesome!
Chris
January 16, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Oh, OK. I’ve heard of people doing that- putting up another graphic saying something like “this site is using my images without permission”. I even know someone who did that when his product was being pirated and the pirate was linking to his graphic.
I couldn’t see any links in the post- the text all looks the same color. Maybe it’s my laptop.
Thinh
January 16, 2009 at 9:22 pm
I don’t understand, isn’t Web Design Tuts your site?
kip
January 17, 2009 at 5:03 am
aw man, I’m sorry I missed it! A 404 now so the content must have been removed…
Scorpiono
January 17, 2009 at 5:23 am
“Until they do, their readers will see what they have done.”
Are you serious? It’s your work man, fill a DMCA complaint at Google!
NetOperator Wibby
January 17, 2009 at 7:48 am
@kip:
Don’t worry Kip, I blogged about it here : [ http://pw-software.com/index.php/site/comments/how_to_deal_with_stolen_content/ ] *and* remembered to take a screenshot. LOL
Brian
January 17, 2009 at 12:33 pm
I updated the post everyone – looks like the site took down the stolen post. Great comments though!
Dainis Graveris
January 18, 2009 at 11:22 pm
so true, bad to here there are people still doing things like that, not thinking how to make community better, but just wasting their time with stupid stealing! However excellent way to let stealers notice
Guy
January 20, 2009 at 11:46 am
Well Said ! xD
Miss Citrus
January 27, 2009 at 11:59 pm
Oh man, I totally saw the imposer on WDT …I was really confused.
st_ash
January 29, 2009 at 10:04 am
Old content still cached by google:
http://74.125.47.132/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fsharegraphic.com%2F2009%2F01%2F08%2Fdesign-the-psdtuts-website-in-photoshop%2F
Circus
January 29, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Brian,
I saw they removed the content fast after you send email and comment to them.
Read the Disclaimer and we will see:
“If you have any doubts about legality of content or you have another suspicions, feel free to contact us by email.”
So they do what they told. They have their own responsibility.
IMHO, Do NOT put so hard on them, because this is only a personal blog. Next time I think you can just send the email and everything will be ok. Using content from other site is normal for now, in the Web 2.0 Century, the problem here is: they have responsibility or not?. The answer: they have. It’s nothing to open a big post like this to fuck a good blog (http://sharegraphic.com) – They update the content usually, I now become a new fan of this blog.
Just a few words, please disregard if you
Circus.
Caitlin
February 1, 2009 at 9:14 am
@ Circus
Are you serious? Stealing content is not “normal”! It may be becoming more and more rampant, but that does not mean it is right in any way.
DailyDesigns
February 14, 2009 at 7:17 am
I agree, stealing is bad, most of the time I don’t just pick images from the net and otherwise I save it and upload it myself and put Source: [URL] at the bottom of my posts.
Great posts, I might put it in one of my posts on my blog (http://daily-designs.blogspot.com/)
Chris
February 14, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Glad to hear you settled the issue. I’m currently having to deal with a guy who stole the entire design of my site including the copy! He just changed a few words and called his own. Check this out, my site: http://www.miaandmaggie.com, his site http://www.danconrad.com. Total BS. Good think I have a copyright on it.
DailyDesigns
February 19, 2009 at 12:20 pm
I’ve spread the message
on my blog.
http://daily-designs.blogspot.com/2009/02/never-steal-content.html
Survulus
February 25, 2009 at 5:10 pm
That sort of thing irritates me so much, why would people think they have such a right? I always give credit to the original artist, because in reality we’re all in it together.
Rafael
February 26, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Oh come on! this is INTERNET, and copying is the true nature of it. What did you expect? If you don’t want “your content” around, then just don’t publish it. Keep it in a safe box just to yourself.
Nobody owns anything here. Knowledge should be public and free. Sharing a tutorial is sharing knowledge and you should be happy it is being republished around, means it was good stuff! Oh you want credits, you want your name, you want the fame dontcha?
Well people just want the content, people dont give sh*t about your little name signature. Are you in it for the knowledge sharing, or are you in it for self marketing? You should be happy actually.
BTW, it is only “stealing” when you loose what someone else took from you. So in this case, what you call “stealing” is actually only COPYING.
Don’t be such a cry baby and DEAL WITH IT. Or jump off the net if it is not for you. There’s no turning back, the revolution already took place!
FROM NOW ON INFORMATION IS FREE AND NOBODY OWNS NOTHING ANYMORE!
and don’t tell me you never download the latest adobe pack from THEPIRATEBAY.ORG (or are you so stupid or rich that you actually pay all that money for software? oh dont tell that hahah!)
Seth Ridley
February 27, 2009 at 4:09 am
Good to hear that they apologised at least. Still, I’ve had this happen not only with content, but with an entire design that was literally lifted image by image. Even the logo was taken, colour washed and then had the new company name Photoshopped over the original. I emailed the site owner and never heard a thing back, although I understand it was an Indian company so maybe there was a language problem.
However, as Rafael says, this is the net, and stealing is so easyand commonplace. There is a difference between getting inspiration from a site, or a site’s content, and stelaing it word for word though.
Brian
February 27, 2009 at 11:40 am
@Rafael:
Rafael, there is some validity to your comment, however you are overlooking what this post is really about. First, yes they were STEALING. They didn’t simply copy and paste the text and upload their own images. I would have been fine with that. The problem is that they were using my server to get the images which is taking bandwidth. I paid for the bandwidth, they took it without asking and used it to save money, and I was losing mony – that is stealing. You mentioned copying like it isn’t anything bad – just to clarify that is called plagiarism and is a crime.
Second, I’ll have you know that I paid my hard earned money for all of my Adobe products. Simply assuming that I would pirate my software shows how you and internet society has not only become more corrupt, but also assumes that the rest of the people online are corrupt as well. This is very sad.
Finally, it is the mentality that stealing is ok that is making the internet a worse and worse place. If people feel they have the right to just steal other people’s hard work and content than what is the motivation for anybody to create anything new and original? I poured over 6 hours of hard work into writing that tutorial only to have it copied and pasted in a matter of seconds. If they had creddited me, yes, it would have been better. I’m not in this for fame or glory, but a citation means that they didn’t plagiarise.
This post was meant to show people that we need to show mutual respect to one another online. This isn’t a ‘free for all’ where anything online is up for grabs and can be used for free. I hope this point has gotten across to a few people.
Sasha
February 28, 2009 at 4:52 am
Good for you that you got it all resolved! I had/have a similar problem where I have had people stealing my images, css and whatever else they could get their hands on! But you can’t stop people from stealing as there will always be some sad loser that will do it
At least leave a comment saying that you love the work!!
Kai Lo
March 24, 2009 at 12:17 am
I’m glad you got the problem resolved! Plagiarism and stealing bandwidth hmm… if I were you I would file a lawsuit to get some money.
Dirk Sorensby
March 26, 2009 at 1:09 pm
If content is put up on the web, it should be free to use and repost. That’s what the web is all about = sharing information and open content.
Even your blogs contain links to other sites and information that you read on other sites – what is the difference really?
DE
cat
March 26, 2009 at 6:29 pm
be entertained
Meeting rooms
April 2, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Awesome, you’ve really touched on a very vital point.
Jim
April 3, 2009 at 5:03 pm
I have a tips and tutorial Blog. And i am facing this problem from auto bloggers.. damn!! they don’t wanna quit. They copy paste my content .. I tried hard some of them stoped.. but now i gave up… because so many of them…
Mark (fetdigitaal.nl)
April 6, 2009 at 7:05 am
Nice
Yashvir Bagwandeen
April 6, 2009 at 10:00 am
My advice is to search for anti-spam and phishing widgets…its the only way! Another tip is to license your work using the creative commons free license service. http://www.creativecommons.org.
BGdesign
April 8, 2009 at 12:13 am
I can’t believe they jacked it like that.
How to Kill Ants - Josh
April 25, 2009 at 8:27 am
I always steal content from people…. what’s the harm?
Just kidding.
-Josh
Stevi3
April 29, 2009 at 11:23 am
Good article, ironically. Your Elite By Design is a great website, but your Web Design Tuts is misleading.
You do not steal online content, but the website is all too similar to PSDTuts.com – which has been an online pioneer for tutorials. It was so similar that I actually thought it was apart of the Evato Network.
The design style, business objective, and articles were all “influenced” or “borrowed” from Psdtuts. I think you are talented looking at EBD, but I think you should elaborate on where the line is drawn from “stealing/borrowing” and being “influenced.”
W
May 2, 2009 at 4:02 am
I have to admit I do sometimes use “foreign-content”, but I usually use only a few lines and then set a link “click here to read further” to the original. I believe that’s just fine.
Mustang
May 4, 2009 at 5:02 am
How come you were expecting a link or reference? Do you license you content under creative common attribution?
BTW: You can’t steal an idea, you can only steal physical objects. They copied it when they didn’t have the right to. I believe they did wrong, but they didn’t steal it. Copying is not subtracting.
Ian Sutherland
May 4, 2009 at 10:55 am
@Rafael Authors should be given credit for their work?
I want to know the name of some who has created a piece of work that has helped/inspired me, so that I can look out for them again. Its not about “5 mins of fame” its about reputation, and people work hard to build one, I say they should be recognized for that, especially when they are prepared to share their hard work and creativity so freely.
Taking some ones hard work and passing it off as your own is known as fraud, theft, plagiarism, cheating or just plain WRONG.
Yes many websites look similar, sometimes by accident, sometimes by design, many applications interfaces look the same , it helps users to keep things familiar, and many times I find its down to the “Client” not just the “Designer”. But to take a tutorial written by some else and say “hey, look what I have done” is bad in the worst kind of way, its shameful.
Brian
May 7, 2009 at 9:49 am
@Mustang:
I’m going to have to disagree with you on that one – patents are ideas. Often times they never become physical objects. i.e. Apple.
@Stevi3:
I’ve received a lot of comments regarding the design of the WDT site saying that it is too Envato-esque. I actually purchased the theme from WooThemes while I’m getting a custom design. I didn’t design the site myself.
Mens Clothing
June 24, 2009 at 3:58 am
Hey, at least you know that somebody *really* liked your article enougth to rip it off!