On Thurdsay evening (28th Oct) I saw an interesting tweet from the makers of one of my favourite pieces of Mac software:
Seems this was a case of when Church sites go bad!
I’ve blogged about my love of Alfred on Churchmag before, not only is it great software but the Alfred site is also very pretty – so pretty that a Bible Forum conference in Florida decided to copy their site – even down to keeping the code linking to Alfred’s custom javascript files in place!
This lead to some amusing and interesting tweets from the makers of Alfred:
Over 24 hours later:
and then:
So Andrew (the main coder of Alfred) put a pretty tasteful banner on there and I think has handled it all very classily. (More so than I’m sure some Churches/Christians would have done! I love the use of ‘Bible Folk’. There were also a number of tweets from Christian Alfred users pointing out we’re all not like this…)
I’ve emailed the Church behind the Forum, the Church of Christ, Brandon, Florida offering my web designer services if they’d like another site (I also pointed out that they rather went against Deuteronomy 5:19!).
I really hope that the rip off was done by a teenager or something who really didn’t know what they were doing – if not, oh dear. (Things like this really don’t help give the Church a good name…)
I’ve had one of my own sites ripped off a few years ago (by a guy in Japan who took it down very quickly following an email).
It will be very interesting to what happens. I’ll keep you posted.
How would you handle a situation like this?
How can we educate people in the Church that “just because it’s online doesn’t mean you can use it”?
[Image from Alfred’s Twitter]
Eric J says
I’d love to hear the backstory on this, perhaps some kid or inexperienced developer did this? I also know that Church’s are NOTORIOUS for not having a clue about copyright.
Eric Dye says
True. I hope they reply to James on this.
April says
Looks like they changed it. That’s just wrong.
James Cooper says
UPDATE: Does indeed look the the JS files have been taken off although some of the CSS files are still in there and hot-linking to the Alfred site and the html is the same.
I’ve not heard anything back from about my offer…
A fre hours ago, alfred tweeted: ” Fun Fact, brandonbibleforum.com have had over 25k unique visitors over the past few days to see how they are “using” our site design 😛 ”
Wonder if we will find out quite what happened…
Joanna says
Ignorance about copyright seem to be quite common. I’ve had the “fun” of convincing people I’ve set up websites for that just because they found an image online doesn’t mean I’m allowed to incorporate it into the site design. They had no idea about copyright on images.
Despite how common ignorance is, I have a hard time believing they didn’t know in this case. That they knew how to steal and modify someone elses design elements (even if they did it poorly), suggests that they didn’t stumble into the design world for the first time yesterday. Surely they would know better. Looks like they have managed to remove the offending design at least.
Phil says
I would be flattered if someone borrowed code or design from any of my sites. But then again, I license everything GPL or Creative Commons.