LogoMaid Rips Off Dan Cederholm’s SimpleBits Logo, and Then Things Get Weird

Thursday, 22 March 2007

LogoMaid is an outfit that sells off-the-shelf logos and corporate identities for a couple hundred bucks a pop. Unsurprisingly, their work is not very original or good, and in some cases, is a flat-out rip-off. Dan Cederholm spotted this knock-off of his SimpleBits logo, on sale at LogoMaid for $199, and posted it to his Flickr account.

It’s not a blatant pixel-for-pixel copy, but clearly it’s a shameless knock-off. They took his logo and added a fake mustache, as it were. Here are the two logos, side-by-side:

Cederholm’s SimpleBits logo is on the left, the LogoMaid knock-off is on the right.

Paul Viluda, the proprietor of LogoMaid, could have nipped this in the bud by simply removing the offending logo from LogoMaid’s store. Instead, almost unbelievably, he responded by accusing Cederholm of ripping his logo off from LogoMaid, and, laughably, threatening “a lawsuit against SimpleBits.” The comment thread at Flickr is long, but fascinating. (Note that the users “ledo_bridgeportwv”, “pretty_petra”, and “midster_05”, are all apparently sock puppet Flickr accounts created within the last day by Viluda.)

Intellectual property thieves have much in common with other vermin, such as cockroaches and rodents: they don’t like the light. Expose them and they hide. The last thing a site like LogoMaid wants is a high-PageRank site — like, oh, say, this one — spreading the word that they peddle ripped-off logos.