We hear stories all the time of GOP candidates using music without proper permission. Apparently they believe the IP laws they have pushed and enacted shouldn’t apply to them. Well now it goes beyond music.

First off we have this perfect example of thievery from Wonkette:

So, you know that painting by David Bugnon of Dead Guy Andrew
Breitbart as a Teutonic Knight in Heaven, ready to take on commies, liberal scumbags, and innocent Department of Agriculture employees from beyond the grave? You know, the painting that one actual professional art critic called a “masterpiece of Outsider art, a veritable holocaust-tsunami of bad taste?” The painting that Patriot Depot is selling reproductions of for the bargain price of a mere $3999.95 for a limited-edition 36″ x 48″ giclee on canvas? The painting which The Patriot Update bravely calls, “The Painting Obama Fears?” Yeah, it’s not so much a painting as a Photoshop mashup of a stock photo of Andrew Breitbart and a character from the copyrighted computer game Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, with a pretty sunset-and-clouds background that probably also came from some stock photo website — no doubt somebody will find that soon, too.

Here’s a side by side of the two:

But the stealing doesn’t stop there. Now we have the case of the RNC actually stealing code from a Democratic programmer:

The Republican National Committee apparently liked one former Democratic National Committee staffer’s clever microsite knocking Republican then-candidate Tim Pawlenty so much, they decided to just, uh, repurpose it. Media consultant and former DNCer Matt Ortega is tweeting Thursday that the RNC’s new site, Obama’s New Ideas To Fix The Economy, is basically the same blank page with a blinking cursor he designed last year for a site called Exciting Things About Tim Pawlenty. The respective points would be that Obama has no new ideas and Tim Pawlenty is boring as heck.

Ortega’s even captured a screen grab of the CSS for both sites side by side to point out that someone at the RNC seems to have simply lifted his code and changed some words and fonts here and there.

Here’s the side by side comparison (click for larger view):

As a developer I can tell you there is no way this code would have come out so eerily similar. Even more disturbing is that such a simple piece of HTML and CSS and the RNC is too lazy to try and do it themselves. Talk about ultra laziness!

Perhaps its time for the Republicans out there to explain why they feel they can steal the work of others without proper permission or attribution. I would love to hear them explain that one.