Jacob the Ripper
UPDATE: After a lie-filled email was sent to Tumblr from Jacob saying “The owner of the blog has rightfully hacked into my local development and home networks and taken the screenshots without permission as well as flaming me for subjects I have not performed.”. Tumblr have politely asked me to remove images of Jacob only. They thankfully are an intelligent company who see the truth behind the whole story and have allowed me to keep all the other images since technically I have the right to.
For the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to seriously start climbing the career ladder when it comes to web development and interface design. I’ve met some amazing people and have even went on to work along side some. There is one spanner in the works though and that is a deviant little bugger that keeps ripping my work (and life at some points).
He goes by the name of Jacob Talbot however from this date on I shall refer to him as “Jacob the Ripper” or simply “Ripper”. Ripper continually copies and duplicates (or what is known as rips in design and development) the work of myself and the work of people who develop alongside me.
Read more to see some awesome examples of his ripping abilities…
Ripping Begins!
It all started way back in late 2007 when I was relaunching my website Kurbed as Klydo. Klydo was aiming to be a new social network to allow people to update their Twitter, Facebook and MySpace all from one place. I knew Ripper back them as simply another young developer wanting to try out Klydo, so I gave him access to an early BETA to get his thoughts and opinions. He gave me some feedback like I wanted and I thought that was the end.
Only days if not hours later, Ripper linked me to his website Zozler which had suddenly updated to copy some of the design features which appeared on Klydo. Now I’m all for taking, what some people call “inspiration” from other people’s designs. That’s how I’ve built up my own design style over the years, by looking how others design and adapting it to my own likes or tastes. However the truth of the matter was it was ripping not inspiration in the case of Zozler.
Here’s some graphical stuff I could find on Google Images;
Klydo’s
Zozler’s
An argument was caused and various threads about the incident were brought up on the forum we both knew each other from. Obviously Ripper claimed he hadn’t ripped anything and that it was purely coincidence. I take responsibility for this though, as I was stupid enough to let someone like Ripper onto my website without truly knowing what they were like.
Zed one, tu & three…
Originally Klydo was a product of Zedtu which was a holding brand for any sites I wished to make along side people such as Caleb Mingle and Jack Willmor. Zedtu’s name originated partially from a website Jack owned called Veetu.com.
Still Ripper came along and found something to copy from even here. Zedthree now appeared online and was the founding website for Youzle. ZEDTHREE?! So he has noticed that the “tu” bit in Zedtu sounds like the number two and therefore has simply changed it to the next number up.
I Join Youmeo
As it goes it kinda died down and we never really spoke again until I started working at Youmeo another site looking to be a social aggregator. Youmeo wanted to buy Klydo however it wasn’t for sale so instead they hired me to work for them. Within 2 months Jacob had actually gotten in touch with myself and my boss at the time. He wanted to help test the newly released but closed BETA of the website. Now this rang alarm bells in my head because I remembered clearly what he had done only about 6 months prior to this. I recall he had even called the office on occasion to apologise personally to me for what he had done.
He had already been given access unfortunately by the person responsible for organising the testers, so we had to quickly revoke his access. Bad times though as he had already been in and from what it seems started his ripping plan straight away.
Youzle suddenly popped up replacing Zozler, now I’m not claiming Youmeo owned “You” in a domain, as obviously there are sites like YouTube. It was another huge “coincidence” though if he never decided to get Youzle because of the domain Youmeo. Not to forget the fact that two ex-Youmeo employees had recently began speaking about a website called Kazle that they were working on.
Now that makes the possibility of a coincidence almost impossible. What are the chances he’d make up his name from two syllables of two other websites doing exactly what his website wanted to do without actually thinking about putting the two website’s names together? Slim?
Over the year I was at Youmeo, we released about 4 major versions with hundreds of minor updates. Every time we updated so did Youzle with what was clearly a “Right click and save” job on our interface images. Things like buttons, logos and colours were almost identical across the two websites.
I don’t have much evidence of this case though due to very little appearing in Google Images apart from the odd display picture. Youmeo has also disappeared from the internet altogether so I’m not able to screenshot anything on it’s website. Still, here are two VERY similar looking Twitter avatars used by the two websites. Sorry about the size, Youzle for some reason designed their’s to be 50x50 whilst Youmeo’s was 300x300 so I’ve resized Youmeo’s making them easier to compare (Youmeo left, Youzle right);
Zood Is The Target…
When Simon Fletcher and myself went our separate way from Youmeo, we decided to open GNRation and begin developing websites that were of interest to us. So we revived Klydo but under the new name of Zood and begun developing it as our headline product. So far people have only been able to see the landing page because we haven’t really released any preview screenshots only pictures taken on cameras. This meant that if Ripper was to steal something it would of had to been from our landing page.
Within a month or two of us releasing our updated landing page something appeared over at Youzle. Not an exact copy but a bloody good try to copy it. This is the best rip yet, as it shows how untalented he is as a designer. He had to design some of the stuff from scratch to make it work for Youzle however the stuff he has designed is clearly awful. Here’s screenshots of the two websites as they are now (4th January, 2010);
Zood
Youzle
To make it worse he actually used Zood’s form sprite which we use for all form elements like text inputs and buttons. The fact that the two images look identical is bad enough (layout, order and colours) but the image even has empty space I left on by mistake because I forgot to crop it;
Zood’s
Youzle’s
19Sites
Another little adventure by Simon Fletcher and myself. 19Sites was a plan to host 19 websites on an awesome piece of kit with 100% uniqueness and customisation thrown into the pot. You can probably guess what happened next, the Ripper stole things from 19Sites landing page for his new website Web24 Conference.
19Sites
Web 24 Conference
I would like to also point out he didn’t quite understand what the logo of 19Sites represented. There are only 19 coloured squares in our logo where has his “24Web” logo has a mere 16 boxes…
Offline
Not only does he copy the websites, he has copied things I bought or did. In the Youmeo office Simon Fletcher and myself started to build a Mountain Dew tower on the window sill which was in front of our desks. Weeks later there were some nice pictures of a Sprite tower courtesy of Ripper on his blog.
On my original iPhone 3G I purchased an Eboy sticker of London for the back. I bought the London one because it meant something to me since I lived in Coventry and always planned to visit London on business. Another picture appeared on Ripper’s blog, this time his iPhone had an Eboy sticker of London on the back.
Now as much as I know thousands if not millions of people will have done these things, why has this person who has copied and stole from me in the past now started to copy things I done offline as well? Surely not another coincidence?
What Can Be Done?
NOTHING! That’s the trouble. As much as he rips the designs of myself and others, unless we are really worried he’ll ever make money from our work we will never take him to court. I suppose that’s always been the reason why I’ve never taken it a step further than to just expose him on forums and Twitter, as I know he will never make it in the industry if he carries on like he is.
So what can I say? That’s pretty much been nearly 3 years worth of hardcore ripping for this young guy and I don’t see it stopping any time soon. Hopefully his parents will send him off to do something he can grasp easily such as window licking. Until then though I definitely can expect more of my things ripped and copied by Jacob the Ripper.
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