StampReady
Email on Acid made a blogpost apologising about their action on their blog. We've also received a personal apology by e-mail from Email on Acid itself.
Thank you.
Apparently Email On Acid updated their article, stating how they came to the attention that the design of the template was hosted on Themeforest. In the meantime this post has reached Hacker news. It's clear that they have modified the content and CSS in the head tags.
They are currently editing the template (again) to have it not resemble ours. Although, I really appreciate their excuses and their action, clearly re-modifying our template is not the correct way.
Although some of you mentioned it's not called theft, but piracy, a huge company like that shouldn't behave in this way. Period.
I'd like to thank everyone once again for their kind support. We appreciate it.
My name is Kevin and as a young entrepreneur, I am driven to grow and expend our
2-man company. We create marketing tools and templates for over a few years now.
Last saturday, as I got ready to work on a upcoming StampReady product, I received an e-mail.
It read the following:
Now, while it's always sad to see other people earning a buck by what we create, we receive such mails very often. The process to take care of such things is rather simple. We write a polite e-mail, stating they are giving away, or worse, selling our work. We demand them to remove it from their website within 48 hours as it's an infringement and piracy. Most of the time they reply back apologising and remove our hard created work.
We all know piracy is an issue that is quite hard to tackle. Each day templates are stolen and given away or even getting sold. Whether it's a complex Wordpress template, e-mail template, a few flat buttons or even a simple stock photo. Piracy is on the rise, and we cannot do anything to prevent it.
But this pirate was a tough one for us. And frankly, it hit us so hard that we decided to create a blog post/thread about it.
As we opened the URL provided by our kind Themeforest user, we immediately noticed it was one of the websites we visit very often. It's such a wealthy company we were driven to grow to. That company was Email On Acid (emailonacid.com).
They made a blogpost offering 'The Talk' our best selling template for free to download. While they modified the stock images, the design and code is identical to ours. Even the typo's our developer has made in the source code are still there. They wrote and stated how they developed the template and how their 'first order of business was to research the most common dimensions'. But first, let's compare them:
As you can clearly see, the design elements, font-size, colours are identical. Of course, they replaced stock photo's. Who wouldn't when offering a stolen template?
Email On Acid broke down our code (we use extra tables in order to cover all 80+ E-mail clients). Breaking down code results in worse alignment, hence their version looks so worse in line-height, padding, etc.
As you can see in example 1, our developer forgot to delete the blank space at the end of the line. So did Email On Acid.
As you can see in example 2, the classnames are consistent. They didn't even bother to delete or modify the classname 'plusIcon'.
Same format, same weight. And if you look closely, the quality loss is the same as ours. We even used the fool proof terminal method Shovon mentioned.
This reply had been send to Nana, our project manager.
1. They are sorry for us that we think they caused infringement and piracy, while they claim it's theirs.
2. They admit they got inspired by us, still claiming to have written the code and how it's drastically different. But hey, the only thing that is the same is just layout and some sort of background, right?
3. They are willing to give us coding techniques so we can update our template on themeforest.
4. They are not willing to remove our work from their site, but they will modify the template (again) to have it not resemble ours.
The very part that made us sick in our stomach is how this company is so called a million dollar company. And yet how they are too arrogant to design some template of their own. While we pointed our daily customers and clients to their service if they were in need of Screenshot testing. In the meanwhile thousands of users has been downloaded our premium template.. for free. The damage in sales are great if we do a little math.
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.
There are 27 user comments on their blog page, and I'm not counting the comments their team has posted. Let's say out of every 50 downloaders, 1 will post a comment.
And that's low ball.
27 x 50 = 1.350 Downloaders
Final sum would be 1.350 x $17 = $22,950
Now, that's a pretty huge amount of theft if you ask me. If we double the amount of downloaders it would be $45.900
The arrogance of Email On Acid is certainly not the right way to attract customers, and not to mention the disrespect they express towards other companies. In fact, it should damage sign up increasement if users knew. Their users actually use stolen work which now of course is strictly forbidden.
I strongly encourage every reader, whether you are designer, developer, entrepreneur or someone who stumbled upon this post to take 5 seconds of your time and press the tweet button.
Thanks for your time, support or tweet.
~ Kevin from StampReady
