As a web and graphic designer, author or any other Creative, where do you draw the line with copyright and when do you pull those strings to control the content?
Here are two examples:
Example One
I recently began doing a rebuild on a Church website. As usual, we went over what color schemes they liked, etc …
The previous agency that had built their website had a contractual agreement with them, so there were some rules and stipulations as they faced a new website build.
I was told the Church could not use the same color scheme or layout.
Many of the colors incorporated were based on the Churches logo and letterhead colors! How could I leave those colors out? Thankfully, the main color used by the Church was not accurately matched and the other colors were tailored towards a darker design and the new site was going to be a “light” design.
As for the layout, the Church wanted to change things up, but where was the line drawn?
Obviously, copying the CSS layout would be “copying” the layout, but how far does that go?
Isn’t header, content and sidebar a layout?
Does it simply come down to pixels width and color palette matches?
Example Two
A few weeks ago we posted about an iOS design cheatsheet.
The author contacted us and asked that we take the post down, since the links had ”nofollow” and we had the cheatsheet on our sever. This is done to ensure post integrity, besides, it saves on his bandwidth. As for the “nonfollow,” we didn’t do this intentionally and are currently working on a solution (any thoughts on this policy and/or solution would be greatly appreciated!).
We obviously took the content down and honored his wishes. Even if he didn’t have a copyright, we would have honored his wishes.
My question is this:
If you create a cheatsheet full of iPhone specs and copy the UX design look of the iPhone, can you still call it copyrighted?
Like I said, the simple request was enough for us to pull the post data. I have no problem with that, but I’m simply curious about where you draw the copyright line with something like this.
Your Turn
Throw in this Copyright History Video into the mix and things get really interesting.
What do you think?
Where do you draw the line?
Peter says
I think that copyrighting should be reserved for original content. It was nice of you to honor that gentlemens wishes and bring the cheat sheet down. I think his request was a bit unjustifiable. It’s the equivalent of me creating a cheat sheet of all the keyboard shortcuts built into Windows 7 and putting it out on the web. What did I do except do some research? The copyright clearly belongs to Microsoft in my example.
Eric Dye says
Thanks, Peter. I think you’re right. 🙂
Peter says
Thanks Eric, I never get tired of hearing that – lol, 🙂