Upenn.edu in Romanian? 'The eyes don't lie'

It's remarkable how much West Philadelphia looks like Romania these days -- on the Internet, anyway.

Administrators of Penn's Web site were surprised to receive an e-mail informing them that the Web site of Romania's Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu -- discovered about two months ago -- looked suspiciously like www.upenn.edu's three-year-old design.

The two sites feature a similar color scheme and layout, as the Lucian Blaga site -- www.ulbsibiu.ro -- displays a featured news story as well as other "News and Events" links in the exact same location as the Penn Web site.

Moreover, the two sites' side menus -- save the language difference -- look almost identical, with each school's emblem appearing in the upper left hand corner of the site. The positions of other links and the font used are also parallel.

"They basically took the design, hook, line and sinker," said Deni Kasrel, director of Web and publishing services at Penn.

Zeno Popovici, a spokesman for Lucian Blaga, disagreed adamantly. He said that in designing its Web page, his university researched the Web sites of approximately 500 universities.

"The design of the upenn.edu Web site had the same influence as the other 500 Web sites included in the research," Popovici said in an e-mail.

When asked to explain the similar appearance of the sites, Popovici replied, "Please put the two homepages next to each other and revise your question. We don't see the sites as highly similar."

But the similarities clearly exist.

"I don't understand how they could say that," Kasrel said in response to Popovici's comments. "It's clear that the sites are more than 'similar.'"

Despite the resemblance of the sites, Penn is not planning any legal action against Lucian Blaga, as Penn General Council Wendy White said that in order to pursue a trademark or copyright suit, it is necessary to show that damage has been done.

"I don't think that there's any confusion" between the two universities, White said. "You don't sue every time there's something out there you don't like."

"We are not concerned about the copyright infringement issues as we don't see the sites as highly similar," Popovici said. "Also, we did check the legislation, and we are well within the limits of the law."

Kasrel said that Penn's Web site design is vulnerable to being copied because, like many universities, Penn makes its templates available on the site.

The templates are posted to facilitate branding consistency across various pages on the University Web site.

Kasrel said that she was not frustrated or angry about the similarity of the sites, but merely surprised.

"The eyes don't lie," she said.

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