Earlier this year, I worked on a project for LBi London where I was lead developer for Turkcell, Turkey’s largest mobile phone company. This Monday, I received an email from one of our designers who’d been contacted by one Yekta Gürel, a UXer from Tribal DDB Istanbul. He informed us that a company in San Francisco, going by the name of Flexible Web Design, had a site that looked almost identical to our work for Turkcell. Further investigation revealed they had swiped about 3 months worth of code, assets and creative and dropped it onto their own servers, looking all the world like it was their new home page. As is oh-so-common these days, it subsequently blew up on Twitter and according to this tweet, Turkcell initiated legal action later that day. Google have now indexed thousands of results on the topic and allegedly the news even hit the mainstream Turkish media. The site was returned to its original state some time later that day but not before a screen shot had been taken by Turkish tech blogger Gökhan Menge.
I’m always proud of the work my team and I do and this is, in many senses, the ultimate form of flattery. I just wish I’d seen it live and in the flesh before it got pulled. Visit Gökhan’s article to judge for yourself quite how flattered we were…
