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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Does this level of copying not imply a copyright infringement?
Even if not, it's really, really distasteful
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.
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.
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 Tim Ferris school of thought. Can’t say I agree with it.
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)
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.
Good artists copy, great artists steal?
Still hurts to be the one being stolen from though.
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
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_.
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