Vodafone Steals WebRupee’s Font Without Acknowledging It!

3 comments

Font from: http://www.vodafone.in/_layouts/1033/styles/css/rupee/rupee.ttf

Bitten by the MNP bug, I was checking out some GSM provider’s website and what they have to offer. While browsing Vodafone’s website it was really nice to see that they used the Rupee Symbol instead of writing “Rs”. Out of curiosity, I started checking how was the symbol displayed and found that the stylesheet looked like the one from WebRupee with few changes:
1) Licence Removed (We had Apache Version 2 license)
2) “WebRupee” changed to “rupee”
3) Links to font file on their server
4) Almost all css same(even the whitespaces) except for the places where they had added some small styling information.

I was still unsure whether the font was copied, so I downloaded the font file to check. And the above screenshot verified it.

So they not only stole the files but were devious enough to change the name. They should really learn from railtourismindia.com, blanketofrelief.org who has been using it without changing the name.

Not only them, rimweb.com has been using it from their own servers, but have left the Licences untouched.

Below are the screenshot of css file contents.

http://www.vodafone.in/_layouts/1033/styles/css/rupee/font.css

http://cdn.webrupee.com/font



Written by Aman Kumar Jain

January 20th, 2011 at 12:01 pm

Posted in general

3 Responses to 'Vodafone Steals WebRupee’s Font Without Acknowledging It!'

Subscribe to comments with RSS or TrackBack to 'Vodafone Steals WebRupee’s Font Without Acknowledging It!'.

  1. I hope so they change it. You can perhaps leave them a mail

    Harshit

    20 Jan 11 at 2:43 pm

  2. […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by punetech.com, Amit Kumar Singh and Tejas, Vishwa Vivek Garg. Vishwa Vivek Garg said: thatz bad RT @punetech: .@VodafoneIN steals Indian Rupee font from Pune's http://WebRupee.com without acknowledgment. http://j.mp/erZW5W […]

  3. While I condemn the act by Vodafone of not giving credit, but “legally” I don’t think they are doing anything wrong. Apache License is a permissive license and allows anyone to modify and distribute the product and there is no requirement of the new product to keep the original license as well.
    But of course, I’m amazed why they had to steal the font. They should have used the original version with proper attributions intact especially since they don’t seem to have made any changes to it.

    Shantanu

    23 Jan 11 at 5:11 pm

Leave a Reply