Vigilante Justice

One of the elements that draws me to develop for the web is astoundingly close-knit and open community of designers and developers. A natural side-effect of such a community is the rise of an A-list, or rockstar group of designers who get an inordinate amount of attention and adulation. Personally, I don't object to this behavior because those who have taken or been pushed into the spotlight are nearly all excellent ambassador's for the craft. They have no issue sharing methodology or inspiration and are constantly giving back to the community at large.

It is for this reason that when needed, the mostly silent community can come together and have a potentially great impact. Recently, Dan Cederholm of simplebits has been the victim of some pretty egregious design theft. He didn't blog about it but simply posted an image of the stolen work in his flickr stream. It has been fascinating to watch the community's response to Dan's situation. At first, nearly everyone who commented agreed it was ripped off and simply sent him condolences. However, at some point the offending proprietor of the site selling the work jumped in with ludicrous accusations and decided to stand his ground against Dan.

And the resulting cacophony was like he individually slapped everyone in the face.

The noise transitioned from sympathetic into proactive, and now the community is coming together and doing whatever it can to raise awareness about the shady business practices of the offending company and supporting Dan in anyway they can think of. Dan never once asked for any of this. It is true that he is a "web-celeb" and is probably receiving some of the attention due to that, but I have seen other designers work get stolen and gain support from our community as well. Typically, the theft deals in CSS and HTML and the offending parties are quick to remove the stolen work as soon as they start to receive the negative mention.

I am certain that design theft occurs in nearly every discipline, but is the community around that discipline as eager to defend one of their own? Can anyone point me to any examples of this?