In case you did not know — I've been running and working for various websites about the popular computer fighting game, Mortal Kombat, for quite some time now.
Over these years I have come across quite some stealing, leeching, and other forms of ripoff. The number of times we had to shut down sections or make server adjustments because people were stressing the bandwidth with directly linking (shrug), and the number of times I've come across work of my own presented as that of somebody else (even for sale!) is something I lost count of a long time ago. You actually become used to it... to an extend, but today I stumbled on a scale 5 fuck you
. I haven't seen them this big for a while, and I think it's worth mentioning.
It all started with some links to new Mortal Kombat Deception renders that were pasted in one of the Mortal Kombat IRC channels I hang around at. The links were pointing to a German fan site — one I don't think I've seen before (which is quite rare). After I looked at the new renders, I decided to take a peak at the home page of this (for me) new site. Strangly, the site looked familiar — I soon realized why.
Let's look at some design elements I noticed on the German site at first sight:
Now, let us compare these with design elements from the Platinum theme (which used to be the only design) of my Mortal Kombat website, Mortal Kombat Kourier:
I was thinking ok, so I'm not the only one that got the idea of using in-game elements from Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance in my site design, and everyone is allowed to use Nedstat to keep track of traffic. The gray colourscheme can also be coincidental. No biggy.
I decided to give them the benifit of the doubt, and wander through the subdirectories some.
Since I'm always very interested in the input of fans of the game, I clicked the Fanarts link in the menu. Hello! Acj Bizar?
Not only did they spell my (old) pseudonym wrong — I don't remember giving permission to feature my work either. Oh well, as long as they don't sell it, no harm is done — it's actually quite flattering (except for the miss-spelling of my pseudonym part).
I scrolled down to see what more names were on there. Hello!
This is where it stopped being funny. I know it appears trivial, but this design element: 
is not from any game — I created that. This little dot changed everything from funny coincidence or highly inspired
to stolen
.
Thinking blah, they're fellow MK fans, and they're probably kids
, yet mildly annoyed, I decided to skim over the Links page. That is when I got really annoyed. I saw a lot of familiar names, as in Mortal Kombat fan sites and their webmasters, but not mine. I'm good enough to take design elements and exclussive content from, but not good enough to be linked to? Or are we affraid of inbounding traffic that might appear on my stats? After all, you do know how they work.
The more I looked at the various pages, the more exclussive content I recognized from my own website, and that of affiliated sites. It's a shame really, it's this attitude that prevents small sites like this from ever receiving any exclussive content of their own.
5 comments so far.
I THOUGHT something was familiar about that site. And to think I linked that site in the news last night.
Posted by: Scott Howell on April 16, 2004, at 07:09
It is pretty lame for them to copy you and not give you any credit whatsoever - not even a link. At least they didn't put a copyright notice on their site; nothing cracks me up more than lamers who rip other peoples' work, then slap a copyright notice on it (except maybe for George Bush speeches, but that's another story).
Oh well, at least you can take some pleasure in knowing that someone liked your work so much they felt compelled to steal it.
Posted by: Caffeine Guy on April 18, 2004, at 04:31
Granted, I was also a bit flattered by the fact that somebody found my design to be good enough to adapt and adopt for their own website. It would have been a lot nicer if they just would have asked, though (like Kamino.org did, for example — heck, not only did I approve, I even advertised it — I'm really not that bad of a guy).
Posted by: ACJ on April 18, 2004, at 21:28
big up mortal kombat
Posted by: abz on May 3, 2005, at 20:32
Motal Komabt - Shaolin Monks - Spoiler
Posted by: foo on January 8, 2006, at 00:07