As someone who has worked in publishing in quite some time, let me offer you a piece of advice on this…

People are going to rip off copyrighted material all the time — that’s because they rarely see it as a crime in their own minds. You yourself have probably done it, as have I. (Anyone remember Napster?)

So what are you going to do about it? Nothing. Why? Because it costs a lot of money to pursue a Copyright Infringement case. Therefore, unless the infringing entity is doing a lot of damage to you (e.g., they were a direct competitor hoping to confuse potential customers), it ain’t worth the effort to pursue it legally. Trust me on this — the legal fees just to pursue a simple “cease and desist” effort until it results in a signed agreement will run you $30K or more. (Of course, you can always try to bluff and hope the infringer goes for it.)

That being the case, there isn’t a damn thing you or your GM can do about these guys. The sooner you learn to live with that, the less stress you will have in your life. Not saying that to be mean — I understand your pain. Just giving you the pragmatist’s view.

At no point have we laid claim to the Suckerfish Dropdowns technique, nor have we laid claim to the creation of the CSS standard or the “logo on top, menu on the left and content on the right-sided body” design. We have laid claim to our unique implementation of the Suckerfish menus combined with our unique implementation of CSS combined with our unique graphics. Had this “designer” copied our dropdown menu implementation and added their own creative twist with different gradients, graphics, bullets, etc., we would not be having this discussion. However by copying – in full – our dropdown/flyout code, our CSS, and our graphics (without so much as changing the file names!) they have infringed upon our copyrights.

Let me ask the question this way: if a company named TC Corporation were to create a logo with a magenta/violet gradient (those are freely available on the web, no doubt), with a T inside that gradient, overlayed with a cursive “C” (it’s a letter of the alphabet, we can’t lay claim to that) in the same arrangement that we have in our logo, would we not have a claim of infringement against that company?

As far as the layout, it is fairly common, and similar to many others of the millions of sites on the Internet. It uses a very traditional layout of logo on top, menu on the left and content on the right-sided body.

The interesting menu scheme is from Suckerfish dropdowns, which have been fine tuned by you, as well as by many others and freely available. Cascading style sheets are the creation of The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and simply control the placement of content in the page, font size, etc.

There are thousands of similar templates available for free and for the typical price of around $45.00 - $65.00. Gradients and backgrounds are also freely available anywhere, or take just a few minutes to create.

Your time may be better spent concentrating on promoting your products, and taking the imitation as the most sincere form of flattery.

My god, your design is like about the same as hundreds of templates I have seen.
Company name on top
buttons on left
picture in middle
content below
footer

A very useful and nice layout
that on thousands of sites!

Did you make the design all yourself without a template
totally original ideas?
sorry I dont believe it

look here
http://www.freewebtemplates.com/download.php?id=4779&t=t
maybe they stole it
and here

http://www.freewebtemplates.com/download.php?id=4774&t=t

Maybe the did copy your code.
considering the CSS evidence it may be

or maybe a template shop stole it
and they bought it.
unlikely but possible?

Who cares, its like stealing a drink of water from your garden hose!
find something real to whine at the world about.

If you wish, you can email me with the information and I will look at it to see what can be done. There’s a good chance that I can get the offending site shut down or, at the very least, removed from the search engines.

I’m sorry again that this has happened to you.

This B2B company found another company copying their website — and caught the thief redhanded. Copying someone else’s website is considered theft!…