Design firm accuses Mozilla of UI plagiarism

"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 today, 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."

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