Why you shouldn't copy us or anyone else

Is this something that people really need be told? I suppose that's rhetorical, given the number of folks who swear by alleged methods of success that just happened to work (or be recollected as working) for one person or another.

Jeff Veen gave an analogy at an Adaptive Path workshop I went to a long time ago. I'm no expert and I don't remember the exact verbiage, it was something along the lines of how in kayaking, there's a few basic rules of safety when it comes to tides and currents, but if you don't understand how those rules came to be, then you're left completely vulnerable to very dangerous edge cases where the rules don't apply, like when paddling under a bridge. If you just stick to a checklist in the situation, you'll get sucked under and die.

I will admit right now that I copy/borrow/steal design and concept ideas from other websites relentlessly.

I find, however, that I tend to do it for stuff around the periphery of an application. For example, how should my forgot password process work? What should my copyright notice look like? How should I format a success or error notification message? What should my button widgets look like?

Such things that are not central to the purpose of an application I am working I expend as little thought as possible on, and tend to copy whatever I see someone successful doing (hey, i think, if it didn't stand in their way, it probably won't stand in mine). I spend more of my "picking apart" brainpower on the original/unique stuff my app is doing.

Admittedly, I do a fair amount of copying of the kind you are referring to as well, but I don't entirely agree that that's the "only" kind of copying that's beneficial.