They say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but recently we’ve been thinking sometimes it more resembles theft. Like in the case of a certain European website that has taken what looks like a copy of TSA and are passing it off as their own design, complete with most of our images, our stylesheets and – yes – our content, but all under a different name. They’ve even overwritten our watermarks!
Recently this was confined to a foreign language ‘version’ of the site in question but over the last couple of days they’ve opened up their ‘English language’ site too. So, we had to step in and clear something up because it’s likely that at some point down the road you’ll come across it: TheSixthAxis does not license out its design, styling and content, to anyone. If you see something that looks like TSA but isn’t, walk away.
We value our writers and community more than most, it seems, so it’s a real shame when this sort of thing happens. We’ve tried to stay friendly and professional on the matter but sadly that doesn’t seem to work – if anyone has any experience in this field and is happy to do a bit of pro bono legal work we’d love to hear from you. We have approached the site in question many times and despite initially admitting the source of their design as TSA (and linking to us with credit) they have stopped responding and removed the credit links so we are currently in the process of gathering the appropriate information to take legal action. Again, apologies for interrupting your daily TSA feed but we just had to get this out there.
Both of these images are of the site in question. No, your eyes do not deceive you, the copy really is that similar to our design. They even update their design as we change ours. We’re not unreasonable, we love what we do and we like to see other sites spring up and keep the scene fresh. If anyone wants help from TSA with design questions or content then we’ll always try to help out when we can (as we have with various sites). We don’t wish any harm on the site responsible for this, we just want the matter cleared up with minimal fuss. Peace.
moshi
Right im off to copymywebsitelawyers4u to see if you can get a no win no fee trial
DeathByNumbers
Do they copy the comments too? Without our members and sense of community they really would be a poor imitation.
Charmed_Fanatic
Wow, they do look exactly the same, shame they have to copy
Mikiyaru
Will the real TheSixthAxis please stand up? Gosh your tall!
gideon1451
Was that meant to be an Eminem reference?
Manorhowze
That really takes the piss. Fair enough they wanna do something similar to TSA but to just literally copy everything and call it their own is ridiculous.
Tuffcub
They’ve nicked all those nice new icons I spent hour doing. KILL THEM. KILL THEM WITH FIRE.
Alternatively tell me where they live and I’ll bum them all to death.
JoshHood
Ladies and gentlemen, I present the resident pyromaniac.
BIGAL-1992
He’s also the residential alternative maniac.
scaramanga1973
They even had the nerve to put their own copyright message at the bottom!!
Next thing you know they will try and sue tsa for copyright infringement!!
solidsteven
THIS MEANS WAR lol they could be reading and copying this very second
mugsybalone
Cheeky sods. Even had the gall to stick a copyright on the bottom of the page.
hazelam
i’ve seen websites that have similar styles to other popular sites, but you don’t often see this kind of wholesale copying.
there seems to be a sort of community of games websites where even rival publications respect each other, they’ll put up stories from other sites but they’ll credit them, and they will even have friendly competitions from time to time.
this though, shows a lack of respect, they’ll never be part of the community like this.
and it’s kinda sad for them, if this is what that site will be best known for rather than the quality of the content.
gideon1451
My word, it’s like Inception. How can we know if this is the real site? :S