You’ve been Denton’d
Nick Denton of Gawker, Gizmodo and Fleshbot (not safe for work/wife) has been caught with his pants down. The .com millionaire’s company stole the code for its fleet of high traffic sites from a college student. Pathetic.
I made it known that iPodWeek.com stole its design from MacMinute last month. That led to the deletion of iPodWeek. Obviously Denton isn’t going to stop publishing, but he does owe Noel some cash.
Even though Denton says he couldn’t afford someone to code his sites in XHTML 1.0 Strict (according to Noel), I’d guess his company has over $15,000 a month in advertising revenue a month (if not, he’s doing something wrong). It’s well known that Denton pays his authors slave wages (around $1000 – $2000 a month) so he obviously has enough left over to pay for the cost of doing business on the web.
Do the right thing Denton.
Denton, I have one thing to say to you. “Roll over and die you sick, demented bastard!” *ahem* If you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of people who don’t take kindly to stolen work. Expect a lawsuit, Mr. Stolen Porno Pants…..I mean, how do you explain that? “I’m like a dirty Robin Hood. I stole his code to promote porn.”
Evil capitalist exploits impoverished designer. Um, unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. I’ve put up a transcript of my last IM conversation with Noel, in his comments box. Judge for yourselves.
Leaves Rustle
Nick:
Good move on posting the conversation. Open source is great. I still side with Noel if there wasn’t a conversation that made it clear:
1) Gawker Media uses a basic template for all its blogs (up until this last week, the sites didn’t look the same).
2) The stylesheet given for Fleshbot has the possibility of being used for all of the sites.
Since you’re all about the ads these days, how about letting people know they can pay him to turn their sites into XHTML 1.0 Strict?
Or how about a portion of the money they save on bandwidth is sent to Noel?
First things first.
Nick isn’t a “bastard”. Okay. He’s a nice guy actually.
Him and I however, have had some major differences and problems with what was done with my code. My major problem is that it was used on multiple sites (which it was not intended for) and that I was not alerted to these actions. If that would have happened, I would have explained completely that I didn’t agree to that and an incident would have never arisen.
The conversations are totally cool with me. In fact, it sheds more light on the fact that I told Nick what he did wasn’t right. I’m not trying to cover anything up here. I have all the conversations too, remember.
Ok, so maybe I acted a bit prematurely. But the point is, notify someone before you take something from them. Don’t steal and pretend like they won’t notice. As it is, there’s enough of this going on in the writing industry. Too many new writers go into movie situations unprepared. They fail to secure all legal outs and leave their script with a production company. The next thing you know, Mr. Writer who though he was forgotten sees his script as a movie (hint, Batman & Robin) which makes millions of dollars. Some movies have even gone as far as ripping off original writing from fan fiction sites (hint, Terminator 3). Technically, yes, these are the writer’s problems for not securing legal bonds, but people shouldn’t be stealing, it’s just wrong. So, I’m sorry Mr. Denton, but my first comment was more directed at all would-be stealers, even though it named you directly. My apologies to you.
Sounds like the movie “Big Fat Liar”. Heh. Not siding anyone here but here’s how I see it: Noel is a code bitch. Nick is just plain dumb. ‘Nuff said.
Gawker Media code-snitch update
More on the Gawker code debacle: I got a polite e-mail from Gawker Media’s Nick Denton inviting me to look at some comments he made. It was a good thing of him to do considering the tone of my post, which was frankly bitchy. But I’m still not convinced…