Irish Political Party rips off BBC website
April 19th, 2009 by redbeast
This has been reasonably well covered in the Irish Blogoshpere, and the whistle was blown by iamsteph, but I thought the rest of you would like to know about it too.
Fine Gael (Feena Gail) is the largest opposition party in Ireland. There will soon there be Local Elections here and all the Political Parties are launching new looks and websites to attract votes. Nearly all parties have been “inspired” by Obama’s success and have been trying to emulate it in some way- well Fine Gael thought that ripping off a very well known Media site was the way to go.
An email went out on Thursday April 16th from Enda Kenny, the leader of Fine Gael to the Party’s supporters:
“Having an online presence is now fundamental to success in Irish politics and as the country enters into election season Fine Gael is going live tomorrow (Friday) with its new internally designed and created website.”
Well Mr Kenny, it looks very familiar!
While visually the rip is pretty obvious- the kicker is that on the day before launch we could see that their developers didn’t even bother to change the class names in the CSS files. Now, since the tale was told, it seems the class names and IDs of pretty much all elements have been changed in the source HTML & CSS, but so far not all were.
Take a look here to see the similarities in the code the day before launch.
Original
Rip
Its all a little fishy- look what happended when Irish Stu overlayed one element from BBC and one from FG’s site
Fine Gael have clearly violated the terms of BBC.co.uk ’s site, but they insist no rip has occured… I really hopethey get a good slap for this one!
Thanks to Mamanpoulet for tip-off
(115 votes, average: 2.04 out of 5)
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dont care
I don’t see anything unique about the BBC site in general so it is not hard to fathom that someone else would could come up with a very similar site. Templates, baby. Templates.
The bigger crime here is that somebody thought it would be a good idea to steal THAT site. Seeing both of them together makes me twice as sleepy. Snore.
They both look exactly like any number of other news sites.
its not that they look similar, but that finegael site’s code was literally copied from BBC website. The code demonstrated that this was very lazily done, as they initially hadn’t even changed the name of a lot of bits of code. Once they started to get heat for it they renamed some files and thought that that made it OK.
It really is incredible that any political party would think it acceptable to effectively break the law in this way.
It doesn’t work conceptually anyway. Why would a political site need movable portlets? Just because they can? It doesn’t make sense for them- LAZY
I think it is much more likely that both just used the same or very similar base themes. Nothing particularly special about either site.
Yeh but the CODE people, look at the CODE!
also, saw this in the paper on sunday-
http://www.tribune.ie/news/home-news/article/2009/apr/19/fine-gael-denies-allegation-of-plagiarising-bbc-ne/
A professional party would have taken the site down immediately (or paid for a properly developed one from the outset); the spirit of “aw, sure it’ll do” lives on.
Paul, are you kidding? You think it’s more likely that the BBC, with a budget in the billions, are using stock website templates and nobody noticed before?
May be a very inspired rip, but neither site is featuring original inspiring and unique designs. This block format is very common in sites all over the internet. Both sites look like they could have been ripped from a thousand other sites.
Why isn’t access to the code blocked from copying it?
Let’s separate code from design, perhaps that will help. When you hire designers to do code, they might be tempted to copy, as writing code is not their strong point. When you hire programmers to design, the design will be somewhat less than stunning as that is not their strongpoint.
What you need is a designer/programmer team, and not try to find both separate skills (right brain and left brain) in one person.
@Henry:
CSS & HTML are tools. A designer that can’t code in them is a designer who can’t do their job.
Programmers don’t do CSS and HTML – that’s markup, not programming.
@Doop
You bring up a good point; A designer that can’t code in them is a designer who can’t do their job.
What this article and the comments are lacking is an explanation of how many companies, (small and big alike) will hire web designers from other companies (like Monster.com, I have friends who work on Web Design through a freelance workers website based in Japan.)
With all of these YTWWN posts, people blame it wholey on the person who probably just payed for the job, instead of the people who worked on it. Just because no designers are listed doesn’t mean FG never hired any.
There IS a possibility of them knowing that the website is a copy, and they either don’t care or have someone working on it right now. Even simple jobs can take forever, especially when you’re trying to hire as cheap as possible (cheaper=less training=more time taken to finish projects.)