Greek eye charts

Back in 2009, I designed a set of eye charts based on the classic Snellen eye charts and optotypes (the classic eye chart that is very familiar all over the United States). One of the eye charts that I designed was a Greek eye chart:

 

I made a lot of choices in creating that eye chart, such as which Greek letters to include, the order of the letters, the shape of the letters (a font which I created myself and which I have never sold or licensed), and the exact layout including what the spacing should be between letters and between lines.

I don’t claim to own the idea of a Greek eye chart. Other people can create Greek eye charts, and they do. A Google image search turns up my Greek eye chart and others. The others look different, as you would expect.

Except for one that looks astoundingly similar—the coaster right below my eye chart from this Google image search:

All of the letter shapes appear to be identical to mine. (The slab serifs on the solitary Xi may have been moved inwards slightly, but it is otherwise identical.) Except for all Deltas being replaced by Lambdas and one Xi being replaced by a Sigma on the last line, the choice of letters and the order of letters are identical. The letter positions are identical in character spacing and line spacing.

To put it mildly, it seems rather unlikely that these are all coincidences.

Would you like to see them side by side? Here, I’ll crop my eye chart to just show the first six lines of Greek letters, and I’ll fade down the coaster background.

    

Here’s an animation fading from mine (white background) to theirs (tan background):

This is a clear case of copyright infringement. And really, would it have been so hard for them to come up with their own version instead of copying mine and making a total of three minor changes?

Update: I contacted the company, told them that the copying was copyright infringement, and told them to stop. I also provided them with evidence from archive.org that my design had been released several years before their copy. They denied that I owned my own design, and said they would keep selling their current inventory. That established to me that their stealing the design was deliberate.

Update 2: I sent a DMCA notice to Amazon to have the product listing removed for their infringing product. Amazon quickly pulled the listing.

Update 3: I sent DMCA notices to their web hosts to have the product images removed. The company then contacted me, told me that they would stop selling their current inventory, and took down the images (or had them taken down by the web hosts). They also offered to sell me their remaining inventory. I don’t have a lot of interest in giving thousands of dollars to a company that ripped off my design.