Recently, in talking about the current contenders for the DSG presidency, a friend of mine made the comment that Andrew Tutt makes beautiful Web sites. I am quite interested in that field, so I took a look at the site for his campaign: http://andrewtutt.com. I immediately noticed some startling similarities to presidential hopeful Barack Obama's Web site: http://www.barackobama.com/index.php.
Digging just a little deeper, it became clear that he lifted large parts of the code from Obama's site and used it in his own. Specifically, code controlling the styling of text and the navigation bar has been copied. You can view the offending code on Tutt's site here: http://andrewtutt.com/content/index.css and the corresponding code on Obama's site (designed by Scott Thomas) here: http://www.barackobama.com/css/globalv2.css.
Comparing the two files makes it clear that not only did he copy without attribution the work of another, but he claimed that work as his own with his "Copyright 2008-Andrew Tutt" at the top. In addition to code, he copied the "look and feel" of the Obama site in other ways, most noticeably in the banner at the top of the page. If one looks closely, you can see that he has taken some of the background elements from Obama's banner and reused them in his own.
I thought that this was quite interesting and perhaps information that the Duke population at large would want to know. These kinds of practices are certainly not permissible in the web design community any more than they are in the academic community; they constitute the theft of another's work in the same way plagiarism does.
MacRae Linton
Trinity '09
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