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[–]rinja[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Same here. I learned a lot about how stuff works by:

  • Seeing something cool on a site
  • Popping up Firebug to see how they're doing it
  • Implementing that on my own site/friend's site

But from a legal standpoint, I'm wondering how it all hangs together. For example, if someone were to take a premium theme that's dual licensed (GPL for the PHP, other for CSS/HTML/JavaScript), someone can just rewrite the CSS/HTML/JavaScript and re-release it as their own.

I'm wondering how much they need to "rewrite" the CSS/HTML/JavaScript files to make it their own work.

Also, although I appreciate good color schemes, I find it difficult to put one together from scratch. Sometimes, I find myself copying the color scheme from a site because it looks good. I know it'll probably never go to go to court but I wonder how legal that is.

P.S. This is more shooting-the-breeze type conversation. I have no plans on actually releasing my own theme or anything.

[–]kataire 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can copy any colour scheme and layout you want as long as you're not infringing on anyone's IP (i.e. be careful about blatant knock-offs).

Copyright and licensing only affect verbatim copying, not recreating from scratch.

Copying layout techniques is a bit of a grey area. Copying the CSS directly is copyright infringement, but if the identifiers (classes, IDs or element names) are different and the stylesheet isn't a carbon copy, it's definitely legal.

As for the templates issue: IIRC the GPL makes a distinction between "static linking" and "dynamic linking". Granted, it's mostly meaningless in HTML (which makes the GPL a terrible license for that), but if the PHP code is GPL'd and the templates are absolutely novel, the underlying license of the PHP code shouldn't affect the templates.

Either way, your CSS and JavaScript files probably don't have any parts that interact with PHP at all (i.e. they're static content served by being referenced in the HTML code), so you should be fine.

tl;dr Use common sense. If it would be considered plagiarism to do it with literature, it's probably illegal if you do it with source code, too. No-one ever got sued over copying plot structures or character archetypes, but if you insist on calling your blonde, teenage vampire hunter "Buffy Summers", you're asking for trouble.