Copy of design - legal consequence

[Ole Bo Larsen]

Are you actually legally allowed to copy any ning site design, to use on your own site? (not thinking about logo's but only the actual design like color, rounded cornes, shadows, fond ....)?

[Bernard Lama]

It's always better to take permission from the respective authors.

[John Petrowski]

You could post a small book on this. I believe the short answer is yes. I believe NING's design studio would fall into similar territory with Wordpress - where the argument is that you can't "create" anything if you're using their platform.

If you're using the NING design studio, you would not be able to legally protect your site just because you chose yellow borders with a pink background and a particular font.

[Ascot]

one thing you can do to (SEMI) protect your layout/template is use images you created for headers,mod backgrounds, etc as you would own the copy on them.

[the_real_macfly]

It depends.  As always.

If the design is trademarked, it is considered as a form of property. In this case, copying means trademark infringement, which can become costly quite quickly.

Heavy-duty CSS hacks might pass the threshold of originality, ie. they could be treated as original computer programs, for which the author can claim copyright protection. Same goes for javascripts, of course. Again, this is a quick way to find oneself in a legal battle. (Copying some lines of code might be considered as fair use, though. The judge decides, and someone has to pay your lawyer.)

What is wrong with politely asking the owner of the community if it is OK to use parts of the design anyway?

[Ascot]

lol read this for the answer.... NAUGHTY MICROSOFT

http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/14/microsoft-plurk-ripoff/

[Ron]

WOW.

[Ole Bo Larsen]

Thanks guys, my own perception is that copying special code is illegal (except for the stuff you can find in Creators forum), but using design within the framework of ning should be without problems.