The creators of the popular WesMatch dating compatibility website accused Yale University of plagiarizing content and design from their service last week.
A lawyer acting on behalf of Dan Stillman ’04 and Matt Eaton ’04, sent a letter to Yale President Richard Levin asking that the “YaleStation Blue Room Degrees” website be shut down immediately. Stillman and Eaton allege Yale copied much of the design, questions and Internet code directly from WesMatch.
As of press time, the survey on the Blue Room website had been removed, but students could still check their compatibility with other students.
“We were shocked and quite disappointed that they would do something like this,” Stillman said. “We went straight to the cease and desist letter because we felt this was so blatant and so willful, not to mention illegal and done by someone who represents the entire Yale student body, that this needed to be taken to a higher level and dealt with by the Administration.”
While WesMatch is managed and hosted independently of Wesleyan, the Yale website is part of that University and sanctioned by Yale College Council (YCC) President Elliott Mogul.
Mogul declined to comment for this article. However, on Wednesday he told the “Yale Herald” that “the only thing we have in common with WesMatch is that we are both dating services.” Later, after looking at the screen captures of the two sites, he conceded, “It does look like something might be going on. We are taking this seriously,” according to the article.
Yale sophomore and Chairman of the Yale College Council’s Student Services Committee, Steven Syverud, says he does not believe Mogul was culpable. Syverud said Alex Clark, a Yale senior who is noted for his talented programming skills, was responsible.
“It seems like this is Alex Clark acting independently of everyone else and making a pretty bad mistake in judgment,” he said. “The way it has been told to me, and the way I perceive it, is that neither Elliott nor the activities committee had anything to do with the copying.”
Syverud was not directly involved in the development of the site.
Alex Clark could not be reached for comment.
As for Mogul’s alleged involvement, Syverud says it could have been an oversight.
“Enough comes across a college student’s table in eight days that you wouldn’t notice the similarities,” he said.
Mogul, however, was the one Yale student who had direct access to WesMatch. Stillman says he let Mogul sign into WesMatch to try it out.
“While we certainly don’t want to speculate as to who was responsible, as far as we’re concerned, we provided the login to Mogul, therefore we feel he bears a large portion of the responsibility for what happened,” he said.
Copies of emails provided to the “Argus” indicate that Mogul was interested in licensing the technology. On Feb. 8, Mogul allegedly wrote to Stillman, “Yalestation developers have been at work on a very similar program. However, it might just be easier for us to partner with you on a YaleMatch system [and give our developers more time for their other projects].”
Stillman replied to that e-mail asking for a fee of $1500/semester and a $250 design and setup fee. He never heard back.
The YaleStation dating site launched four days later on Feb. 12, and since then, more than two thirds of the Yale undergraduate population had filled out the survey, according to the “Yale Daily News”.
The “Herald” reported that Mogul deemed WesMatch’s fee to be too expensive for the YCC.
Stillman says when he heard of the service, he thought they had just copied the concept.
“I suspected that they had in fact gotten some ideas from us, and there’s not much we can do about that,” he said. He forgot about it for more than a month.
Then, while searching on the Internet recently, he ran across an entry from a Yale student’s web log quoting questions from the survey.
“They were familiar to me because I, in fact, had helped write them,” he said.
Stillman says at that point he thought what they did was unethical, but not illegal. It was not until he gained access to the service through a friend that he learned the extent of the similarities.
“The questionnaire was literally our questionnaire: it was visually and functionally identical to ours. They didn’t even change the colors,” he said.
Both sites feature the same yellow and blue color scheme, multiple-choice questions with space for a personal answer, a desired answer in others, and a ranking of the question’s importance to that user.
The similarities run much deeper, however. A document detailing the alleged plagiarism sent to Yale and provided to the “Argus” highlights questions lifted verbatim from WesMatch or changed slightly to be relevant to Yale.
For instance, the category of “Neediness” is identical, including the answers written by WesMatch such as “Like a vampire, I feed off other people.”
Other questions that were virtually identical included the categories of “Religiosity,” “Verbosity,” “Diet,” and “Artistic Ability,” which changed “I’ve shown in Zilkha” to “My works hang in the Yale art galleries.”
A Feb. 16 article in the “Yale Daily News” reported, “The Yale Student Activities Committee’s 12 members created the 40 survey questions two weeks ago. After outlining basic topics they wanted to cover, the group e-mailed each other about possible questions and answers.”
Neil Katsuyama, a Yale freshman who wrote that article, says that statement now looks suspect.
“It seems like they came up with [the site] overnight,” Katsuyama said. “So it’s not out of the question that they would have just plagiarized it.”
As for the underlying engine that calculates the percentages, Eaton says that Yale would have had no way to steal WesMatch’s underlying code and he speculates the Yale programmers worked backwards to figure out a system of their own. Eaton says Yale’s system was not as sophisticated.
“You’re able to infer [what the Yale programmers did] by the questions they came up with themselves,” he said. “[Their original questions] were just a grab bag of trivia for answers.”
This suggests that the Yale matching system matched answers one-to-one with other users’ responses, rather than the gradations possible in the WesMatch system, Eaton said, stressing that this is conjecture.
Stillman and Eaton allege that the YaleStation website “includes original HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code from WesMatch,” according to a document provided to the “Argus”. Stillman said that copying the concept of the engine is not the real problem here.
“I understand the limitations of the copyright which does not include methodology,” he said. “While I do think it would be pretty dishonorable to retain the exact methodology of WesMatch, that is outside the realm of copyright.”
After WesMatch publicized its allegations with a news release on the WesMatch homepage Stillman was contacted at 3:00 a.m. by the chairperson of YaleStation who denied responsibility, and said he removed the material as soon as he was made aware of the accusations. Stillman says the chairperson told him, “It’s clear that the people in charge of the visual things took some shortcuts.”
The Yale student suggested resolving the dispute directly. Stillman says he told him it would need to be “dealt with through official channels.”
Alan Kennedy-Shaffer, a Yale sophomore, is a representative on the Yale College Council. He says he was not involved in the development of the website, but is good friends with those who worked on it.
“I don’t think the copyright violation itself is that bad,” he said. “But, if they’re making money on it, that is.” Kennedy-Shaffer had argued against selling ads on the site.
“The first reaction of people I talked to was disbelief,” Katsuyama said. “Just the fact that the look might be similar, and the engine might be similar, people said it’s possible that it might be coincidental. But, a lot of [the news] is just coming out now. When all the details are in, there will definitely be a change in attitude here at Yale.”
After the “Yale Daily News” article appeared, students began to acknowledge that there may be a real problem.
“It’s ridiculous to say that they were created independently,” said Yale sophomore Jennifer Shields. “The side by side pictures were pretty much identical.”
This week, the WesMatch Network is launching services for Bowdoin College, Oberlin College, and Colby College, in addition to the recently launched site for Williams College.
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