why get out of bed when you can read about people who got out of bed

37signals gets ripped off. join the club, guys.

my beef with people copying my work is not so much that they're benefiting from my hard work (which is fine by me), or even that they might remove my copyright or something and claim it as their own (which would not be fine by me). my concern is that if someone viewed both works that looked similar, both claiming to be by different people, how would they know which was copied from which?

for example, if one saw my site and then saw this guy's site, one might wonder, who is copying off of whom? now my credibility is coming into question because it may not be clear which was created first and one might think i'm the one blatantly stealing someone else's design.

in the case of 37signals, they had customers calling to ask whether they were affiliated with the site in question. had that site been about something objectionable instead of a piece of software, perhaps those customers wouldn't have even bothered to validate the affiliation and simply stopped doing business with 37signals.