How do web design copyrights work?
May 27, 2010 by
Filed under web design
How do web design copyrights work? Are they copyrighted at all? Am I allowed to copy ones buttons off their website? Or their layout or colour scheme? Obviously I wouldn’t copy it exactly. What about modifying it some what? Thanks in advance guys.
The “code” on any website is protected along with all images that come with it, you need to ask before you copy or you may end up being sued or having your domain and host shut down.
The best thing to do is ask or even better, come up with something original!
if the website has put a copyright notice on their website (even if it’s just something as simple as Copyright 2008 ByMe,Inc) then everything on their website is “protected” and you cannot legally copy anything from it. The trick however is to determine, do the pictures on their website belong to them in the first place or did they just copy them from someone else too. In other words, how to know who the original creator was of an image. For example if I go to a website that has free icons/images on it and then put those images on my website with a copyright notice, does that give me the right to sue some that uses that same image somewhere else.
tricky stuff huh. Easiest solution is to either get our images/buttons, etc from a website that permits people to use them or create your own from scratch.
you can copy the color scheme but you cannot use any of thier pictures including buttons. You could design a similar button of course.
By the way, whether it says copyright or not, you cannot use thier images