Ask HN: Why would a startup choose to rip off another startup's site design?

Why? perception that the design being copied 'works', has been iterated, tested and improved.

Morally justifiable? The internet is still a bit of a wild west, if you don't want something copied not putting it online would be the only way.

I don't think you can sue someone for using the same homepage design / product page etc as you.

I'm just playing devil's advocate here; I don't necessarily personally agree with some of the things I say in this comment.

Let's not be too hasty to accuse people of illegal or unethical activity. Consider the possibility that stealing the design was an idea an employee or contractor had on their own, and the founders were unaware. Or maybe both companies bought the design from the same third-party provider. Or maybe one of them developed the design and legitimately licensed it to the other.

> How can the co-founders morally justify that it's OK?

If the victim wasn't okay with the site's styling being copied, they shouldn't have made it publicly available. Besides, CSS is trivial and therefore not something all that important.

> Aren't they afraid of getting sued like how Touch of Modern was sued by Fab?

If Lot18 is a small startup, they might not have the resources to sue. If Caskers is a small startup, maybe they don't have enough assets to be worth suing. If they're both small startups, maybe the intersection of their userbases is sufficiently small that there's a high probability no one will notice.

> Were they hoping people wouldn't notice?

I'm sure that was the ideal outcome, if someone did in fact steal the design.

If css/html has been directly copied (evidenced say by comments from the original appearing in the copy) then that certainly creates a prima facie case for infringement.

However, I would say in this case, although the new site may have been inspired by certain stylistic elements of the original (white item background on a dark main background), I wouldn't say this is anywhere near sufficient to amount to actionable copying.

Overall Lot18 feels much more polished than Caskers on a brief navigation of both. In any event, it would be advisable for Lot18 to focus on their own business rather than expending energy taking action against Caskers.

I think on the scale of "all immoral things", if you were to rank them from 1 to 100, taking someone else's CSS and HTML has to rank as a 1 or 2.

And it's so trivial to modify the CSS class names, and reorder them... How easy it would be to copy it and never get caught actually makes it less immoral to do.

Lot 18 does Wine, Caskers does Spirits. Both sites use pretty standard ecommerce templates with tweaking. Lot 18 absolutely has done a ton of tweaking and great design work but the core remains the same. A gallery style page with big, friendly images. None of it is groundbreaking design work. Upon closer inspection, the user flow isn't very similar.

I haven't looked at the source but there's a very thin line between taking inspiration from another sites interface and biting it wholesale. Copy Pasting = Bad, Taking the core concept and evolving it = good.

I work at the same startup space with the Caskers guys and honestly, they look too busy killing it and expanding their business to be sitting there plotting how to steal Lot 18s swag.