You know, I think I’ve had every single plagarist I’ve caught tell me that it was “one of their guys” and that they were going to severely reprimand or fire him. 

I guess that’s the industry-standard way to save face. :)

Are, the joys of a good blog post on a blog so well optimized that it out ranks the source site…

Maybe they should employ you to get their site a bit better sorted in the search engines ;)

Mark,

I’m 100% on your side. I would have leased the hounds on them. The hounds being ‘Big’ Vern and ‘Kneecaps’ O’Riley.

That said - as the owner of a company, I can concieve of an employee doing this. If I found out I’d talk to them and fire them. What could I tell you to save face though?  Short of naming them not much I guess.

Interesting problem. Perhaps a description of how it happened or why the theft wasn’t recognized…

I think I’d try to meet you in person in an effort to prove my sincerity if it was a huge kerfuffle. Maybe post an explination and apology along with the redesign.

Any better ideas?

To be honest there’s nothing you can do other than take their word for it, unless you want to take the matter further (e.g. charge them for the bandwidth costs involved). At the end of the day you don’t know whether they’re telling the truth or not so you just have to give them the benefit of the doubt, even if that makes you feel like you’re going easy on them.

If you think “it was someone who no longer works here” is a bad excuse, I’ve also had the excellent “well, I thought if I put ‘written by (author name)’ at the bottom of the article it would be okay” as an excuse for reposting one of my tutorials on a site.

As an aside, if I try and right click on the Gravatar link next to the email address field, the text disappears in Firefox - a bit annoying because it means I can’t open it in a new tab (same thing happens if I try the Option+LMB shortcut).

Intersting excuse that one. Very original!

Oddly enough, It was quite the same I used when a Sony’s lawyer called me about my Oldboy sharing at Bittorrent ^^

Its interesting to hear you complain about theft when it happens to you but you happily steal diagrams from Robert Bringhurst. - At least you then accepted the fact and gave credit where it was due after it was pointed out in the comments in another post. Glass Ceilings and all.