Web Site design, is this copyright protected?

Thanks,

Hi, Your Web site is protected by copyright law. If you designed it, you own the copyright and no one is allowed to copy it. That being said, Web pages and whole sites get copied all the time.

Best, Deborah

from

In Space 2 of the application, give a brief statement describing the original authorship being registered. Use terms that clearly refer to copyrightable authorship. Examples are "text," "music," "artwork," "photographs," "audiovisual material" (including any sounds), "sound recording" (if the sounds do not accompany a series of images), and "computer program."

Do NOT give statements that refer to elements that may not be protected by copyright, that may be ambiguous, or that do not clearly reflect copyrightable authorship. For example, do NOT use the terms "user interface," "format," "layout," "design," "lettering," "concept," or "game play."

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• TL *

Yes -- the layout and your text and images are copyrighted (automatically).

Mary T. 8-)

Aunt Molly's Bead Street

I wanted to double check before I answered, so I went to the source. The best place to look for answers about copyright questions is probably the U.S. Copyright Office. In less than 60 seconds, I found

I realize that, especially to web designers, it seems wrong that layouts and design can't be copyrighted, but it's really common sense. Can't you imagine a letter from lawyers for Big A** Ham Inc., saying "we own the copyright for a logo in the upper left hand corner - and by the way, cease and desist using background color #67489D with text #999999." There are only so many possible layouts - if they were proprietary, to publish anything would cause endless bickering.

I still don't understand why typefaces can't be copyrighted. I also don't understand how the ITC can sell you a license to use a typeface that can't be copyrighted.

• TL *

I was doing websites years ago -- before there were graphics on the web -- and to me is common sense. The code is copyrightable if you are actually creating something (shopping cart, photo album) with the code but the way it shows up on the screen isn't. This makes perfect sense to geeks (ummm, that would be me) because HTML has a few built-in and purposeful limitations -- it was designed to share content not to present it. Have you ever noticed how a web site may look different from one computer to the next? Sometimes only slightly, but sometimes significantly? How can you copyright an unstable product?

HTML is actually a mark-up language, much like what goes when you format a letter. The contents of the letter are copyrightable; the layout of the letter is not.

I have beat this dead horse enough!

Hear! Hear! I've never understood that either. What is produced at the end of the creation process? It's certainly not an idea, a user interface or a game play!

Jewitch

Yes, exactly. There are a few tricks that can be employed to add stability to your layout (such as putting everything in tables and/or using mainly graphics instead of tags) but even these are not foolproof.

On my website, I use a Papyrus font. It looks great on my computer at work (where it was created) but it reverts to plain old Helvetica when I view it from here, as this computer is much older and I don't have Papyrus here. I could always make a graphic which uses that font, but that would take a long time to load and that's unacceptable to me. I want text on my page immediately so that the person browsing has something to do while the pictures load.

I once did a layout using all these new and fancy tags which were supposed to become standard. It was so easy to move things around on the page and it looked great, and I was really pleased with myself-- until I fired up Netscape. Suddenly it was an unbelievable mess :) That's when I decided that staying with the simplest tags possible is a Really Good Thing!

Well, I just flogged it a little more for ya :)

Laura

Don't discount the possibility of independent invention. I haven't seen your site and therefore can't make any claims about how likely it is that someone else could come up with a similar layout on their own, but coincidences do happen... and if you didn't look at anyone else's site while designing your own, *you* could be the independent inventor!

Celine

vj found this in rec.crafts.beads, from "Tante Lina" :

]But ]it's not against copyright law, unless they copied your graphics or text. ]Mary's statement is incorrect.

that is my understanding of the laws, also.

----------- @vicki [SnuggleWench] (Books)

realistically how many ways are there to skin a cat? er I mean set up a web page. Serendipity happens for everyone . . . everyone is inspired by the same God/nature. To always assume that people are copying you, like people are out to 'ruin you' is very tiring. ~An artist creates from an idea. . .but they think about it first and it's in that thought where the magic of originality occurs.~ Dawn

Some people are stupid. Copying someone else's look is no way to build a following of your own.