Back in 2002 when Cinema Blend was still very new, and in some ways so was the internet, one of our regular readers decided to go off and start his own competing website. In the process of doing so he didn’t so much start his own website, as create a carbon copy of Cinema Blend. He didn’t actually plagiarize any of our words, but his site design was a carbon copy of ours. It was obvious that he’d simply stolen our design and changed some of the colors. I knew about it, and didn’t do anything. Even back then in those early days, when movie webmasters were still trying to figure things out, I knew it didn’t really matter. If you’re good enough at what you’re doing, if you have a voice, if you write something interesting, people will show up for it. All that stuff around it doesn’t really matter.
Cinema Blend is now one of the most popular independently owned entertainment sites on the internet. That copycat website lasted about a year before they gave up on it. I can’t even remember their web address.
In recent years the entertainment blogging arena, which was once populated entirely by independent writers using the web to create their own thing, has been flooded with corporations. Backed by more money than sense and lawyers with time on their hands, they’ve jumped in to try and push us the independent crowd out of the way. In some cases they’ve bought up independently owned blogs and put their lawyers to work looking for ways to monetize them. Because these movie sites are now run by corporations, those websites need publicity and profit right away, they can’t sit and wait ten years like I did, for their work to slowly build an audience and for advertisers to recognize the value in what they’re doing and come on board. Maybe that’s leading them towards panic, I don’t know, but it looks like one of the ways these newer corporately owned sites hope to add audience and income is by suing their competitors.
Either that or Deadline just hasn’t learned any of the things that the rest of the web community learned a decade ago. They’re suing the Hollywood Reporter for allegedly stealing the design of their TV appendage TV Line. They call it “copyright violation” but to me that seems like a pretty broad definition of the term. What they’re really accusing THR of is stealing their “source code” which is to say they think THR’s design uses some of the stuff used in theirs. It’s exactly what happened to me nine years ago, but I had the good sense not to care. Maybe they simply aren’t as confident that the quality of their work will win out, maybe their corporate masters are simply getting desperate. I don’t know.
It’s worth noting that anyone teaching web design will generally tell you the best way to learn it is to simply go and check out what others are doing. It’s even generally accepted practice among web designers to copy parts of code from other websites. It’s a great way to learn from each other, it’s how the look of the web changes and grows. I’m not talking proprietary, innovative, software or anything. Just generic html and CSS coding, which seems to be what Deadline is all up in arms about here.
The company’s history of legal entanglements and generally catty behavior suggests that this may simply be a case of “they don’t get it”. They’ve long gone out of their way to attack anyone they perceive as a competitor, with barely even the slightest provocation. Back in February for instance Deadline sent cease & desist letters to The Wrap with obviously bogus claims of infringement. From my point of view as someone who’s been doing this for more than a decade and really enjoys the work of all the publications involved, it’s like watching a bunch of kids fighting over a useless piece of plastic. I’d rather see Deadline spend its time reporting on industry gossip, rather than trying to make it. They’re really good at the former. No one should want to be good at the latter.
