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LayerVault. What's up with the DMCA?
10 years ago from Allan Yu, YUI/YUX?YUSUX?
Patrick Rogan, 10 years ago
Yesterday, before I actually did my research and heard LV reply to this, I would've whole-heartedly agreed with you. However, it seems amazingly obvious that it's not even about the fact that it's Flat UI, but rather a blatant attempt to copy LV's assets. It cannot be a coincidence that they managed to magically get the same color palette, icons, and what not. As a designer who has had work stolen and have friends who have suffered from the same, I think we need to stop victimizing the author of the GitHub assets. LV sent them a friendly email which was the way to do it, they were being jerks about it (as I'm sure has happened to many of us), and they tried to play it off. So what? Shrug it off? Absolutely not. If you don't expose a thief, you're responsible for the next thing he steals. LV didn't even sue them, they merely said "Hey, we tried to tell you to take this down or at least change it the nice way, but you're acting like a criminal here. If that's the way you want it, I'm going to treat you like a criminal."
LayerVault, I can understand why you would want others to not use icons similar to yours, but DMCA is absolutely not the way to go about it. Accept that your own design did not emerge from vacuum - comparisons to your, designmodo and noun project icons sometimes show greater similarity between you and noun project than from you and designmodo. Something so simple as flat icon style is bound to look similar.
Same goes with colors and overall visual style. It's clear that designmodo made something that overall looks similar to LayerVault, but they also provided many sources to designs that show very similar style and colors that predate LayerVault.
Once again, I am very disappointed with your overall attitude to this. So much, that you lost me as a customer, and even as Designer News member.