Some people say that, whether it was truly a case of plagiarism or not, it would have been polite if the propietor of Lethean-Sound.com had emailed me in advance to say he was lifting somewhat heavily from my own Web site, as discussed earlier today. In fact, I did get an email in the middle of the day today (still after the fact, but better late than never) from Lethean-Sound.com that was very polite and apologetic, and afterwards, at my suggestion, a small credit appeared at the bottom of the site’s home page that read, “Some CSS and code courtesy of Khoi Vinh.”
As I said, I was not, in general, made particularly angry by the affair, though neither was I pleased. But the correspondence quickly mollified me and made me realize that, if it was not polite for the site’s proprietor to fail to contact me about the design in advance of launching it, neither was it particularly polite of me to fail to contact him without first posting about it here on my weblog.
Why I Said It
My only defense was that it was very, very early in the morning — or very, very late at night, depending on how you look at it. I’d had a long day and I had been meaning to dash something off about this since Saturday, so I did so in a somewhat rash state of mind. And, admittedly, I did see the potential for a pretty juicy weblog post in it, which more or less bore fruit in the form of lots of excellent and thoughtful comments from readers. So I am guilty of a kind of online opportunism myself.
Anyway, my favorite comment came from Rob, whom I don’t know personally. He said, “Life is too short and the Internet is too big to get angry,” which I pretty much agreed with wholeheartedly. No real harm was done by Leathean-Sound.com, and if anything, it added a bit to my life by inadvertently providing a small episode of unique experience. So everyone wins.
I just better not catch nobody trying no funny business like this again!
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