I’m having a bit of a dillema on another site… I won’t go into specifics, because most of you don’t even have an interest in this kind of thing, but recently I created this great layout. I had an idea in my head, and I was looking around at other sites for ways I could possibly jazz it up.
Now, when you’re decorating a house, and you’re looking for ideas, you tend to look at those interior design magazines, or through wallpaper samples at the local paint store, or watch those “fixer-upper” shows on the home and garden channel for inspiration. Later, when you’re in your own house, planning exactly what color scheme you’re going to use in a certain room, and what couch you’re going to put against the back wall, and what style curtains will look the best on the window over the kitchen sink… inadvertantly, you will use ideas you found in your search for inspiration.
Sometimes, inadvertantly, you buy three pieces of furtiture you’ve been looking at separately, without realizing that you had already seen them in the same living room. I mean, that just happens. The human mind retains this kind of stuff without really thinking about it consciously.
Anyhow, all of this to say that I may be having copyright issues on this layout. Going around different websites, I made a list of things that I liked… a link hover effect here, a color scheme there, a page idea over yonder. Well, when three or four of those ideas were put onto my site, somebody stumbled across it and realized that they had, inadvertantly, all come from the same site. They’re commenting on it, saying that I’ve copied it from him and that they’re going to contact him to “see what he thinks.”
I’ll probably have to change the layout (which took me a month of tears, sweat, and PHP error messages) to appease them all, because his site is WAY more professional and well-read than mine… and in the Internet world, that means EVERYTHING.
Anyhow, I started this post to ask a question… seriously, what is Internet copyright? I mean, how can you prove without a doubt that you’re the one that came up with something in the first place? I mean, the guy who came up with, for example, having recent posts in the footer… does he have a document saying he did it first? And if he can’t prove it, why should I have to?
So I guess I’ll start working on another new layout before this gets out of hand. I hate hazy Internet rules… I really do. And I apologize to anyone I just bored to death. Sorry.
Would it be possible for you to post the links to yours and “his” layouts so we could see? Or could you email them to me? We recently dealt with issues such as these in class and I’d love to help. Most likely (and I really do mean most) you are fine. You may want to change some colors or switch places of a few elements in the layout to feel more comfortable about it, but generally speaking it really does take a lot to have a case in court about copyright issues of design.
April 28th, 2007