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Comment by _m8fo | Hacker News Reader

Is a design copyrighted? What's stopping someone from duplicating Stripe's design? The CSS and HTML are both right there in the browser for everyone's viewing. Given how nice Stripe's website is, it's a wonder why it's not copied more often -- and other "nice" websites, for that matter.

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Basiclly everything that's created in the U.S. is under copyright, that includes HTML and CSS source code. Even if you wrote completely different code, but your design was a pixel-perfect reproduction you'd be violating copyright (I'm talking about a wholesale ripoff here, not one element like drop shadows being copied).

Can you explain to me how Discord was able to copy Slack with (seemingly) no backlash?

That really just comes down to business decisions. Sure, Slack could have gone after them. They probably would have a case. On top of a lengthy, expensive, distracting legal battle, the press around it wouldn't be ideal. Even if they are completely in the right, it's probably not the conversation they want around their product.

At the end of the day, they're not quite competing for same market.

You are partly correct. You can't copy verbatim, but you can create a derivative design.

Also, fonts are not copyrighted! Only the data used to create the font, but not the font itself. Thanks to some very old laws (partly to do with not being able to copyright the alphabet) look that one up. :)

Fonts are copyrighted. That's why you don't have Microsoft Office fonts on Linux for instance. Look at fonts from the 3 major OS, you'll notice that there is little overlap.

In a similar topic. The fonts renderers are copyrighted too. Maybe you remember some weird-looking unsmooth text on a java app running on the openjdk, that's why.

Last but not least. No, you can't create derivatives just because you want to. Derivation is very well covered by the law.

P.S. By "copyrighted", I mean whatever legal protection applies to these things, which may not be copyright law.

I really don't have the time to provide links. But you are not correct. Fonts were copied all the time by American printers in the earlier years. (from European sources) And there's court cases where Adobe tried to sue font artists for taking their fonts, and they lost. Because the law allows copying of fonts.

Just google it. If you find a counter argument, it's likely misinformed, you may have to dig to find the truth.

Any and all technical specs and software are copyrigtable, but not the shape of letters.

I'm not sure - I don't believe so. I'm guessing no one would copy their design verbatim for fear of being called out. It would probably be obvious since they have a unique look. However, I'm sure we'll see other sites with designs that have been inspired by Stripe.

www.mixpanel.com - here’s a big co using Stripe’s design as “inspiration”

Yeah, that is very similar. Especially the dropdowns.

A lot of b2b services have adopted that design style. https://www.octobat.com/ - https://baremetrics.com/ - https://www.intercom.com/

More I can't think of right now...

Stripe's current design went live sometime in September 2016. Mixpanel's went live somewhere in Jan 2017. For a design overhaul of this scale, it's unlikely there was any 'inspiration'.

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