Could I get in legal trouble for copying a website's stylesheet?

Question

I like the simplistic look and design of some of the Microsoft blogs. Alas, I can't join the Microsoft dev party and create my own development blog on the blogs.msdn.com page because I don't work at Microsoft, and I already have my own wordpress blog.

I was looking to have my blog styled to one of the default looking themes shown here: http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/default.aspx

Could Microsoft take legal action against me if I used a stylesheet from their page? If I made my page 'based' off their stylesheet, e.g. written from the ground up, would that be copyright infringement?

Answer 1

I think Microsoft uses one of the templates that come out of the box with community server. But even if they didn't, I haven't heard of a case of someone having a cease and desist based on leveraging someone else's css.

Answer 2

AFAIK, and IANAL, and all those other useful acronyms....

Under UK law, I believe you can get away with this kind of thing as long as there are at least 6 demonstrable and obvious differences between the copied article and the copy. Since I'm not a lawyer, I'm not going to go into what constitutes a demonstrable and obvious difference, but I would imagine a colour change would count as one...

You would obviously have to check the laws of your region before taking this advice.

Answer 3

Could Microsoft take legal action against me if I used a stylesheet from their page?

Absolutely, since you infringed their copyright. On the other hand, it's debatable whether the stylesheet alone constitues a sufficient threshold of originality to justify legal actions¹. At the least, taking without asking is often considered rude. ;-)

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¹⁾ No. It certainly doesn't. A sophisticated design however will.

Answer 4

Technically, they could. It is a violation of their copyright. If they exercised this right, however, it would likely be a PR disaster.

I think you're probably safe if you use it.

Answer 5

This would be a horrible idea, but you couldn't get into any trouble if you simply linked to their css.

You could also link to a copy of their css that was located somewhere else that is not associated with your website ;o)

Just some thoughts ...

Answer 6

Yes, you can get in legal trouble for copying a site's stylesheet since it's typically a copyright violation. Worse, you could get publicly bashed on blogs like youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com, making such blog posts about you high-ranked Google results for your name, thus tarnishing your reputation irreversibly.

Don't do it, it's not worth the risks.

Answer 7

You could. You probably wont.

Most importantly: Why bother? CSS is pretty simple, it's essentially positioning a bunch of boxes around, and colouring them..

Just look at their CSS files and layout, and reimplement it yourself.. It'll probably end up easier than reworking their CSS to work with your site (unless you completely copy their site, including the CSS, HTML and layout images), plus you'll learn a lot about CSS while you do it.

Answer 8

Of course you will, Microsoft China was in a similar situation back when their Juku Blogging Service was found out to be a rip-off of Plurk, and yes, line by line code copying.

Microsoft responded with: “Microsoft takes intellectual property seriously, and we are currently investigating these allegations. It may take some time due to the time zone differences with Beijing.” when they were asked about it.

Here's a link to that article I was referring to.