It came out after (Singularity Hub's design came out August 17, 2009; TC was Aug 27, 2008). TechCrunch is one of the biggest blogs on the planet; they're not using a generic template. While the design isn't copy and pasted, it is clearly really heavily influenced- imagine if a site did that with, say, TC articles. That would be plagiarism. Why is copying a design any different?

None of these alone are definitive, but together, they make a pretty good case:

  - Search on top left, with a button titled "Search"
  - #CCC box around the header
  - Header: Logo/Ad on the top, links and icons on the bottom; partitioned the same way
  - Spacing and style of the navigation is really similar
  - Three article images across the top: images are both 203x155, and the box has a blue padding and darker blue border.  Both are named #header_features, inside a #col1 (admittedly, naming conventions might be a WP thing).
  - Boxed in articles with the title and author/date on left; comments + social media on right (this is admittedly generic.. but it does have a TC feel to it)
  - Article meta data and the article itself are split by a dotted gray line

It was designed by "YourCustomBlog," and their portfolio (http://yourcustomblog.com/wordpress-design-portfolio/) indicates it wasn't just a "customization" (meaning, it was a made-from-scratch design, not a modification of an existing template.