Dont be so innocent ! Every designer do this but dont accept . This is very true !
Even If you claim to produce something of your own .I can prove it whereever its already existing , but that time you will excuse it saying you have got some inspiration .
Originally Posted by daisy carver
Very true, but proving it already exists doesn't mean squat. I can prove that money has been around longer than I have, but what do you think happens if I try to copy it and use it to pay for stuff. Apple just got out of a very expensive lawsuit saying that Google (or whomever) stole their ideas. Yes, Apple lost, but do you have as much money as Apple to fight the battle?
Most of the code out there has probably been written by multiple people that might never have seen the code before, it is the act of putting it all together and getting it all from one place that matters the most. But you are talking about cloning one not getting inspiration from one, there is a very VERY big legal difference. You could write your own code from scratch but your cloning is going to be the look. Even then, yes a lot of it is done but you normally wouldn't go around telling everybody you are going to rip someone else off, that is an admission of guilt and intent, or whatever the legal terms are.
I have seen several programmers get fired at companies I have worked for just because they were in a hurry and grabbed someone else's code and it was just for one function of a script. It's doubtful the boss would have even known if they would have just kept their mouths shut since it was only 10 lines of code in a program with hundreds of thousands.
Now if the sites you are grabbing the stuff from are open source, not as much of a problem with code. Also, some of those sites might have been built with templates that where purchased and if you don't pay for the templates, you are stealing.
If you clone the site, they can go after the owner of the site and then you. If you don't publicly announce that you are going to be a cyber thief, what you want to do would probably never raise an eyebrow. So basically what I am getting at is don't be an idiot and announce to the world that you are going to steal something...SMH