What gives!!! (Copying?)

Subject: What gives!!! (Copying?)
From: "Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2001 09:26:01 -0500

Eddie Bonham reports: <<I was just looking at some of the latest tools for a
new project and it seems like eHelp has copied KnowledgeBase.net's ROI page.
Or maybe they just look too similar!!!>>

Can't really spare the time at work to do the comparison, and I'm certainly
no eHelp fan, but you should be awfully careful making such suggestions in a
public forum; you can get sued if you're wrong and cause damage to a
company. There's no easy way to check the date on Web pages because even
minor tweaks to a long-established page can change the file creation date
(so eHelp might actually be the ones being copied), both companies might
have used the same Web authoring software and plug-ins (or even templates)
to create nearly identical pages, and neither company might be the one that
originated the design (it might have been provided by a third-party
e-commerce solution provider or taken from a book on Web design). Worse yet,
"look and feel" issues are pretty tricky; it appalls me that Amazon (was it
them?) was able to patent "one-click checkout", an obvious idea that would
seem to fail one of the prime criteria for awarding a patent (the item being
patented must be nonobvious), but patent and copyright law is a tricky
business and based on this particular patent, it's obvious that I don't
really understand the legal niceties.

For those who do have time to check out the sites:
http://www.knowledgebase.net/products/roi.asp
http://www.ehelp.com/products/roboassist/calculator.asp

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"User's advocate" online monthly at
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