Alex Rivera | Logout

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

Asked 2008-09-30T11:55:14.377
21

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?

css wordpress
Edit
Report

2 Answers

23

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. ;-)

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

answered 2008-09-30T12:00:36.347
0

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 ...

answered 2008-09-30T12:05:59.513

Your Answer