Wired's Gadget Blog has broken a story about the possible poaching of a Silver Lion-winning iPhone app called iPint by advertising agency, Beattie McGuinness, and Coors. The company suing them for $12.5M is Hottrix, a company that develops applications for mobile devices. They filed a lawsuit that copyright infringement has taken place when Coors ripped off its app, iBeer.

Nick Parish, Associate Editor at Creativity, sums it up well:

"According to the lawsuit, Beattie McGuinness Bungay contacted Hottrix to license the developer's $2.99 iBeer application, which uses the accelerometer inside the iPhone to simulate drinking a beer, but was rebuffed by Hottrix, whose application was one of the most downloaded in the iPhone App Store. BMB then went around Hottrix, creating a near copy with iPint and releasing it for free, causing iBeer sales to suffer."

Oooh. That so does not look good for Beattie McGuinness Bungay. The agency, run by elite ad man, Trevor Beattie, was in talks with TBWA to be acquired, but those talks went south last week. Trevor is not having a good week.

Why do advertising agencies feel it's okay to rip off small companies and independent artists? First of all, you're gonna get caught. It's 2008. The internet is here. Hello? Secondly, the brands (generally) pay agencies enough to give original creators a bit of cash for the use of their tech or design. Stealing creative is one reason why advertising gets such a bad rap. Hey kids, lets knock this shit off. It's so not cool.

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