Pirated Lim Kok Wing University website

Who said piracy only belies in audio, video and software. Heck, we even got it for websites. Ever thought no one would dare copy a mutli-national corporation or large organization’s website (not leaving out small-medium as well)?

Well, on the Internet today anything is possible. Even similar or how some may call it, pirating of a website. It’s not the first case to happen and it’s involved big names to lesser known names. One of the recent ones in the international scene was from 31Three; Original VS Pirated. The most recent local case involves pirating of Lim Kok Wing University’s website.

In the design community, we all know how wrong it is to copy a web design and what makes it worst is if there’s no innovativeness to the copycat. We’re looking at a similar design and the only thing differentiating from the original is the content or context.

Yes, users of pre-made templates have similar templates but I wouldn’t consider them copycats. Pre-designed templates are general libraries of web designs fit for any business. Therefore, this is a totally different category on its own.

Coming back to the issue of the Lim Kok Wing University (LUCT) website being pirated. Take a good look at what the Version 6 of the LUCT website looks like. Besides it being just a university, LUCT is a design school where they teach about concepts and basically train graduates to come up with ideas be fitting their clients.

After you’re done with that, I’d like you to have a look at this website. Then let’s play a game, how many similarities can you spot from them. If you can spot 10 of 10, I’m pretty sure we have a copycat here.

In the Low Yat forum, we’re debating who copied who – pretty obvious to me. Now, as a web designer I could go on all day long about this but I’ve got a better idea.

Question of the day:
What benefit(s) or negativity do you think either one of them has from this?

p/s: No animals were harmed or involved in this post.

[tags]piracy, plagiarism, lim kok wing university, web design[/tags]

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