We seen a product launch on Product Hunt and then found that many of the things are a copy/paste of our own product https://www.creative-tim.com/product/soft-ui-design-system-pro
My message to them:
"Hey guys,
Congrats on the launch, we checked the builder and it seems there are many things that are simply a copy/paste of our product which was launched 8 months ago: https://www.creative-tim.com/product/soft-ui-design-system-pro. In the beginning, we thought it’s a simple coincidence as these sections are usually similar in this ecosystem but then we saw that you took our own texts (which are a reinterpretation of Kanye Ipsum (http://www.kanye-ipsum.com/), which is different from "Lorem Ipsum" that most templates creators use). So even if you copied from Kanye Ipsum it’s impossible to be the same texts...
Here is the first example
Then we took a closer look and found the code that is for the “gentle-wave” is the same as us, we used it from a free source on Codepen but we extended it, with our own values. We found the same values you have in your product. So you took that from us, not from the original source where it is open source.
Then there are other examples like the pricing section or headers that are 1-1 copied.
Pricing: https://imgur.com/a/uaRWazU
Another Pricing section: https://imgur.com/a/55RFtZ1
Header: https://imgur.com/a/2bMLb2o
Features: the hr vertical w/ opacity has the same code as us: https://imgur.com/a/vhebzNf
More copied sections can be seen here: https://demos.creative-tim.com/soft-ui-design-system-pro/sections/page-sections/hero-sections.html
Don’t get me wrong. It’s perfectly fine to get inspiration, to add things on top of that and improve, but it’s not cool to rip off our hard work of 6 months. Hope the community will understand and will not support/upvote this kind of thing...
Best,
Alex"
Full comment and discussion here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/material-builder-2-0-1
What do you do when things like this happen?
I know from my own experience how much research, effort, money, and time goes into the creative process of any product, and from what I've seen it there are a lot of features that are not only inspired from but downright copied 1:1.
It is true that the web industry and usually UI/UX interfaces have similarities and it is impossible to make something completely different from what already exists (it's kind of like a continuous fork based on what was already), but seeing the same text and CSS properties is definitely a red flag, especially when you are actually SELLING this.
I know that @DannyPostma had these issues with the Headlime project.
update 1: they responded they will investigate and change the copied code
Hmmm,
It's really hard to believe he wasn't aware of this.. I think that's just his way of publicly not admitting anything...
Sad...