Recently on ProBlogger.net an article was posted which drew quite a large and lively comment discussion. Someone had ripped off the layout of the ProBlogger site and was using it on their own blog. Their blog was on a similar theme as ProBlogger – amateur blogging. From what I’ve seen Vince of AmBlogger.net (who was since changed his layout to differ somewhat from ProBlogger’s) didn’t really credit Darren’s ProBlogger, or Rachel’s Cre8td Design for the look of the blog – at least not until called on it.

The absolute certainty of most spectators that Vince did in fact have a case to answer to, in terms of infringing on copyrighted materials, has made me wonder. Just how far is too far?

It seems obvious that a copy of a whole site design (CSS, layout, imagery) would constitute copyright infringement, but where is the line drawn?

For imagery I expect (yeah I’m speculating; I can’t be bothered finding facts to back this up, and they’d be Aussie laws that’d be irrelevant to the USA) that a rip off of any individual complete image would be wrong, even if renamed and altered in terms of filetype, resolution or palette.

But for CSS and layout – hmm. A complete CSS file replete with original comments – obviously wrong. Likewise for a layout. And like with images I expect it doesn’t cut it just to remove original comments, change selector and id names and colours. But what about a chunk of a CSS or layout? What if the original isn’t a complex masterpiece, but rather a simple minimal design?

What if the person lifting a CSS takes the whole thing, but refactors it such that it’s more modular/cascading, and in the process shrinks it and makes it more efficient? What if they take a CSS and layout and reshuffle the layout components into a more pleasing design? What if they replace copyrighted imagery with similar stock pictures?

Where is that line? And, what colour is it? :-P
PS I expect it’s border-style:dashed;