Design firm accuses Mozilla of UI plagiarism

From InfoWorld: A Canadian interface design firm accused Mozilla of stealing user interface (UI) elements for a development tool in the browser maker's Jetpack project, which aims to simplify add-on making.

MetaLab of Victoria, British Columbia, leveled the charges Tuesday when the 11-person firm's founder, Andrew Wilkinson, blogged about the similarities between his company's designs and those posted by Mozilla for FlightDeck, a Jetpack editor.

"What they did was pretty ridiculous," Wilkinson said in an interview, arguing that there is a distinction between being inspired by another designer's work, and copying it outright. "There's a difference between inspiration versus ripping something off," he said. "The measurements of the graphic elements [Mozilla took from us] were the exact same, the very same pixels. When someone takes your images from the server hosting them, that's crossing the line."

Mozilla apologized to MetaLab Wednesday. "While the design direction being implemented does not utilize these design elements, we inadvertently included the early mockups in our blog post and video announcing the next phase of development for the Jetpack SDK," said Mozilla in a blog post of its own. "We sincerely apologize to MetaLab for incorporating design elements from their web site in our early mockups and for posting them publicly without proper attribution."

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