Forum Moderators: not2easy
I have an informational content website which happens to generate revenue from selling ebooks. I copied another website's layout and design but changed the color, and removed several minor details but added all of my own titles, pictures, text content/articles, meta tags, etc.
This other website is in a completely different field than me-it is certainly not a competitor. I would never blatantly STEAL a website, but what I did is so hard for me to quantify, as this type of law is such a grey area. It tends to be more qualitative than quantitative.
My argument is that this web design that I copied is such a plain vanilla, elementary design. I mean there aren't 2 million ways of designing such a cut and dry web layout. But still I am paranoid about getting sued.
Does anyone have any ideas or information about situations like this? Is this grounds for legal ramifications? Thanks - I really appreciate any feedback!
My argument is that this web design that I copied is such a plain vanilla, elementary design.
It is always intriguing when people steal something and then claim the thing they snatched was not of great value -- then why bother stealing it?
If you've reached the point of asking yourself, "is it legal?", you've long since answered the question, "is it ethical?"
If you care about such things.
>>Does anyone have any ideas …
If you are so worried about being sued, why not just come up with your own layout?
Surely, you can come up with something better than this "plain vanilla, elementary design," right?
I'll add to the chorus: while snagging good ideas from other sites is a long-standing tradition (and usually perfectly legal), completely swiping someone else's design is bad form. Why just copy another site, particularly if the design isn't all that great? You'll sleep better if you do this the right way and either change the code & design enough to make it unrecognizable, or better, come up with your own design.
If you saw a basic layout you liked, and wrote your own code to achieve something similar, that's likely okay.
Up to a point, it's no problem if your site uses design concepts that are similar to other sites, just as it's no problem that most cars have four wheels and a steering wheel. It's important to develop your own approach for the distinctive details, though. You'll get further ahead on the web if you find user-friendly ways to be original. Ethical and practical reasons support each other here.
If you need help with basic layouts, look around for tutorial or discussion sites. There are lots of places where people share ideas freely to help you get started legitimately.
In the US, it would really depend on whether HTML would be considered computer code, art, or literature. I somehow suspect that it would be considered computer code, because that is where lawyers would probably stick it (though it really does not meet that qualification).
Then if it is considered computer code, did you take bits and pieces of it, or did you grab the whole page, strip out the content and replace it with yours?
In computer code, when there is a limited number of ways to achieve something efficiently, that code segment is not proteced by copyright. So you can, with a clear conscience copy that code fragment. For example:
for (redwidget = count = 0; widget[count]; ++count) {
if (widget[count] == red)
redwidget++;
}
This code has multiple ways to do the same thing. but a limited number of ways to do it efficiently. Even using the same variable names will not cause problems, because they are obvious and there are a limited number of choises that would make sense. This can acutally apply to very large code fragments, especially where there are well defined algorithms for what must be done, such as for mathematical functions
But if you have a lot of those code fragments put together in the same order, and the only reason is that you copied all of them together, you will have a much more difficult case. Then if you start getting into look and feel issues, they will probably be able to nail you to the wall.
Of course that only applies to US copyright law. it is my understanding that european countries can be much more strict.
Like the others said, if it is such plain vanilla, why bother copying it. Look at their page, see what they did, then do something similar
