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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

If he's using your code, you have something to say, otherwise, not really, thankfully. I don't want to live in a world where SCO wins, or Apple puts the kibosh on Microsoft for creating an interface with icons and windows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...

I think you should calm down, take a deep breath, accept the compliment, and see how you can work together. It sounds like he'd be happy to help you make it 'ready' faster.

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That's not true. Making a "new" version of something that is intentionally a copy of something else is copyright infringement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit Only clean-room reverse engineering is good enough to avoid copyright claims in the US.

"The US requires" (via copyright law), and "Intellectual Property" including copyright.

How is this any different from Font Awesome being very similar to the Glyphicons set used in Bootstrap?

A few days ago, when it was posted (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3672526), the comments were largely positive.

I'm not saying that nwienert is necessarily right or wrong, but it's strange that this post received such a strong reaction compared to the Font Awesome post.

Bootstrap is intended for use by whoever wants it. Font Awesome was presented as a tweak, an improvement. Svbtle is intended for a small audience, and Obtvse is a straight rip-off

When it comes to interface design, Lotus vs Borland has "you" covered:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_v._Borland

Something doesn't have to be illegal to be morally reprehensible. It's perfectly alright to think that copying a design should be legal and to still believe that it is morally wrong.

I'm not sure where the idea comes from that when someone displays displeasure with something, they want it to be illegal. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's good.Just because it's not good doesn't mean it should be illegal.

there is something called "ethics" and "politeness". when you choose companions and collaborators, these are quite important values, obviously, the guy haven't heard of these words and obviously working with a person like that is not fun, you will then feel ashamed when he does something like this as a part of your team.

Under European law this would be copyright infringement on account of copying the design. Don't believe it holds in the US, but I'm not 100% sure.

Can you show us some references to this law? In Europe you can apply for design patents. Afaik doing so costs a four digit sum in EUR plus the patent lawyer that writes the legalese for you.

However, to get such a patent the design must clearly be novel. Really, really novel. My uncle happens to be a patent lawyer a.d. who fought a lot of cases about product design for a big telco in the European patents court in his time. Knowing a few of his cases, I strongly doubt dcurtis design would be eligible for a design patent in Europe.

The blog itself (it's functionality) would fail an attempt to patented for similar reasons. Apart from that, yes there is copyright everywhere but where this starts in cases like the one at hand is a gray area at best.

I'm not a lawyer, but it appears to be covered in the Berne Convention [1] as "works of applied art". The copied design we saw this morning was probably "substantially similar" [2] to the original. Apparently designs are copyrighted in the US as well, in contrast to what I thought [3].

[1] http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/treaties/en/ip/berne/pd...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity (in US copyright law)

[3] http://norcal.gag.org/legalities/2004/legalities_no03.html (first question)

Yes, everything is copyright its creator.

I guess my point was that all that doesn't matter if the original design doesn't exhibit enough originality (I used the term 'novel').

To give an example: if I have an A4 page with left aligned text, that looks very similar to any other A4 page with left aligned text that happens to use the same font size and line height.

In the case at hand, the design wasn't even dcurtis', he presumably took it from http://drawar.com/ Or maybe not?

With a design so simple, similarity by coincidence can't be ruled out. I wouldn't be surprised if another dozen websites existed that exhibited a /very/ similar design.

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