RESOLUTION: See the last comment below and “Theftoptopia Gate is officially over.”
I got an IM today from friend and ex-roomie Alex Shanfeld who said:
alex: a wall paper made by you came up on my super cool background program jawn. gumballs.
me: is your super cool background program randomly grabbing flickr images?
alex: i don’t think so. I’ll find out what its called in a sec.
alex: desktoptopia.
So I go visit this site and find out that for $20 bucks, you can have “Desktoptopia automatically update your monitor with fresh designer desktops … from our ever-growing master collection.” Now, I remember making that desktop. I was on a film shoot in North Philadelphia at a “mom and pop” grocery store, and I decided to snap a macro picture (one of my favorite techniques) of an old gumball machine. I liked the way it came out, but I decided to take it further and tweaked the colors in photoshop and then resized it as a desktop for my 23″ cinema display and Macbook. On Flickr I commented “this can be used as a wallpaper for the macbook (highest resolution).”
C’mon, Eli. Get to the POINT.
Ok, here it is. I’m not concerned with the fact that my photo appeared in a for-pay service’s library without my consent. I’m not concerned that they didn’t even link back to me. What concerns me is that when I googled “desktoptopia eli horne,” I came across “my” member profile page on their site. It says I’ve been a member since the 12th of August, 2007. NOTE: This page has since been altered by the folks at Desktoptopia. Luckily, I snapped a picture first.
A. I’ve never heard of this site before today.
B. I certainly never created an account.
C. I can’t find any text on their site disclosing the fact that they are harvesting flickr for “designer backgrounds.”
Also, the fact that they stole clipart and style cues from Shaun Inman’s Mint stat application doesn’t help their case. I looked around for a credit back to the original author, didn’t find any. And I’m sorry, but from the look of your site, I don’t believe you created them yourself. Screenshot of Mint’s forms, compare to this screenshot of Desktoptopia’s forms.
Copying clipart is a little thing, and we’ve all done it. Sometimes somebody just “gets it right” and it’s hard to improve on their work. When I started making websites, I bit off of other people’s work all the time (I can admit it). But at the end of the day, making it yourself is always better. Just being different, a taste of originality, can make up for the fact that its not “as good” as what the other guy had. Be influenced, be inspired, but don’t “save as” and upload. Please?
That said, apparently I’m ranked 51. Everyone knows that should be higher (joke).
C’mon guys. You have a really cool application idea, but you really have got to be honest if you are selling your software. I’d be more than happy to agree to let you use my photo, and I might even contribute wallpapers to you in the future, but you need to straighten up your act. Fast.
UPDATE: Wow. I really didn’t expect this kind of turn-out for my story. Thank you to everyone for drawing attention to this situation. I don’t usually have a lot of “celebrity moments,” but as a web geek I’m totally going berserk about some of the rockstars who have commented below, and that I’ve been linked to by one of my idols.
Eric pointed out that “now the profile you linked is “Unknown†with no associated backgrounds. It still has the same join date, though.”
Guess its a good thing that I took a screen grab of the profile page then, isn’t it? Can’t really say why I felt the need to. Better safe than sorry?
/update
Totally not cool. I can’t believe I didn’t notice that they were lifting my icons (not to mention the entire markup of their contact form) from one of my own sites.
You’re slipping. The Google cache of your search has you ranked 25th.
Shaun, I’ve noticed that they’ve been using your code and design since the site launched quite awhile ago. I figured since it was linked to so many times, you’d find out about it faster than if I emailed you. Sorry!
I like the idea of their software, and think it could be really cool. But artist attribution is a huge flaw of it. I remember seeing some really cool desktop pictures on a roll of the demo, and it was impossible to find the original author.
Eli, I hope it gets worked out. And that’s a great photo by the way. Also, this is by far the best blog design I’ve seen in a long long time. Absolutely loving it!
Huh. And I was just trying out their software yesterday… interesting development, hope you get it all sorted out. I hate it when people pretend to be you so they can get authorization…
That is sad! It would be great to read about the follow up, if there´ll be one!
I’ve reported the link to Apple as a distributor of stolen content. It should actually be removed by Monday. It’s not Apple’s policy to post downloads that distribute stolen content.
And now the profile you linked is “Unknown” with no associated backgrounds. It still has the same join date, though.
@eric - thanks for the heads up. I’ve updated the post to include a screenshot of the profile page before they changed it.
I saw the original post to this site on Shaun’s site, and subsequently tried the Desktoptopia app out. I may have even paid the $10 for the thing (by the way, it didn’t work too well). I assumed they were smart enough to get consent from the content creators. Wow. They not only stole from the content creators, but kicked them when they were down.
@joshua - Holy crap, thanks for the compliment. I’ve been an admirer of your work for a long time.
This current theme came to life in an odd way: I was redesigning my resume in anticipation of moving to New York, and really liked the layout. So I cobbled it together into a WP theme as well.
Its still rough around the edges (missing a footer, not all pages have even bottom margins), but it works! I’m planning on cleaning up the code/css and then releasing it to the public, but I think I’m going to wait until WP2.3 comes out with native tag support. Either that or swap out the tags for categories.
Hi Guys,
A big thanks to AJ for making us aware of this.
Unfortunately, it’s not the first time someone has uploaded a background that they didn’t have the rights to. We have someone physically look at every desktop submitted for quality control, we attempt to make sure everything is on the up and up copyright wise too, but it can be tough. This user used your name Eli and linked to your Flickr page (probably a fan trying to give you credit), so things looked kosher.
We’ve removed the photo that belongs to you, and blocked the user from future uploads. We’re also brainstorming ways to better protect artists rights at upload.
We’re also embarrassed about Shuan’s “Required” icons that are clearly the same. It’s a glaring example of unethical web designers. We plan to change it first thing on Monday when we’re back in the office. Sorry Shaun.
[...] What a link from Shaun Inman looks like Back in September I spotted something fishy over at desktoptopia, and managed to get a link from Shaun Inman. While the whole situation [...]