Monday, May 04, 2009
Kevin Norton stole my design!
The first image is a screenshot of my own business site kevin.ie, the second is the portfolio of Kevin Norton, a possibly Irish ‘designer’ based in London.
See the difference? No neither can I.
Kevin Norton has illegally stolen my the complete visual design, as well as many designs from my portfolio, which he has passed off as his own. This is a complete copyright violation of my work and my clients and is completely illegal.
I was alerted to this on the 23rd February, and sent him a notice to remove the content immediately. He temporarily took the site down, but it is now back up, so I am forced to take more serious action. below is a copy of the notice sent to Mr Norton.
If anyone could advise me how to find out his hosting company that would be appreciated, so I can take this matter further.
Mr. Kevin Norton,This is to advise you that you are using copyrighted and protected material on your website. Your site (http://www.kevinnorton.info) is a direct copy of my own business site (http://www.kevin.ie) including, but not limited to, the XHTML, CSS, Visual Design & Layout and the contents therein. This is original content and I am the author and copyright holder of all code, design & content on this site. Use of copyright protected material without permission is illegal under Irish & EU copyright laws.
Remove this violation immediately or I will deal with this matter in a less discreet fashion.
I expect a response within 5 days to this issue. Thank you for your immediate action on this matter.
Kevin Cannon
Update: 4/5/17:00
Found out some more information on this guy. According to his LinkedIn profile, and some investigatory work by the people on Creative Ireland, turns out this guy recently got a contract job at London based, company in march of this year. I wonder he got the job as a result of any of my work being in his profile. Some of the people on CI suggested I should inform the company, I’m not sure if that’s ethical or not.
Update: 4/5/23:00
Found that Kevin Norton has a Deviant Art profile, where he proudly shows the header I designed and explains that the image was done with with autodesk maya and Mel Script. Not true, it was done in Processing by me and copied and pasted by him, with ugly typography to boot! Also, looks like he copied my design at least in April 08, he’s been posing as me for quite awhile.
Update: 5/5/11:00
The site is now offline.
I sent a copyright violation notice to his hosting company, GoDaddy, and also Jon from Kidic, a Dublin-based band I did a a design for, sent a notice Kevin Norton, himself yesterday asking him to remove the screenshot of their site from his page. I’m still waiting to hear back from GoDaddy and Deviant Art.
Update: 5/5/11:00
Although I didn’t contact them myself, the company Kevin had listed as currently working for contacted me and stated he’s no longer working for them. I’ve removed the reference to that company from the post now.