Jul08
04
Regator Looks Mighty Familiar
On TechCrunch, Mashable and RWW yesterday, the announcement of new blog aggregator Regator. Here’s what it looks like:
Remind you at all of this?
Maybe I’m just having a bad day, but it wasn’t even Justin or I that originally picked up on the similarity(ties). It’s all over Muti thanks to Robin Pietersen and there’s a fair bit of noise on Twitter too.
It’s possible that Stork’s foodcrEATions had bugger all to do with my post ages ago, but highly unlikely. It’s also possible that the Ozzies behind Regator have never heard of or seen Afrigator, but come on… This is just getting ridiculous.
Update: Issue is resolved, the similarities are purely coincidental
think this demonstrates RWW, TC, Mashable’s wordlview more than anything else.
Wow. I hope you guys have some sort of protection clause for this kind of thing?
[...] and Mike both speak out against this and I think it’s important that we all try and add our voices to [...]
[...] Stopforth - Regator Looks Mighty [...]
I wouldn’t want to be in Afrigator’s shoes on this. This spells a lot of work to come.
I must admit it is nice to see some competition in the ol’ aggregation space. Don’t let it upset you. Competition will hopefully make you build an even better product. Afrigator has a big head start there. (Existing brand/audience etc).
Or if you want to get upset, just think about how angry Technorati should be with all of you. Or how Digg should hate Muti.
There is nothing new under the sun.
[...] is some more on this issue: Regator Looks Mighty Familiar - Mike Stopforth Regator.com steals our brand - coincidence? - Justin Hartman Shocking: Regator rip off Afrigator - [...]
Whoa, just read about this on Justin Hartman’s blog; the coincidence is a little too uncanny to believe. It kind of sucks as I’m not sure what the legal steps you could take to defend your intellectual property; unless of course you’ve patented the idea and copyrighted all imagery?
What you can do is put a strong boot up the aussies ass, and as Shaun said it gives you even more motivation to take Afrigator to the next level.
Thanks for the mention Mike. It’s an interesting situation.
FYI - The link to my blog is missing a ‘b’, correct link is noboxmedia.com
I had the pleasure of chatting with Justin and the afrigator guys today and they have retracted what they said earlier about Regator doing anything close to copyright infringement as our site is anything but identical to theirs, even by coincidence, once they actually saw the site and we had a chat. They are good guys and this was just a misunderstanding that snowballed. Shows you can’t believe everything you hear on the internet…
You can see Justin’s post here: http://justinhartman.com/2008/07/04/regatorcom-...
Cheers Mike!
[...] the Afrigator team and I made a big stink about how we thought Regator looked a whole lot like our project. As is often the case I think we [...]