Hello--
It turns out that I have some grim experience in this area. While
a member of the late, unlamented Art History Webmasters group, I had the
experience of one of the members copying most (and this would have been
several pages) of one of my Web sites. He took the layout and the
information. The perpatrator was 16 years old and had the audacity to pass
"his" work off as the product of his infant genius. Although several of my
fellow Webmasters wrote me off-list to express support, officially the
group did nothing.
The official position, as far as I can understand it, was that the
layout and design elements are not copyrightable. My content was links
to other material with descriptive comments. Not even that was protected,
I was told, about which I argued to no result. By the way, the bratty boy
is the son of a quite wealthy lawyer who was formerly a member of the
Canadian government. From the prose, it appeared to several of us that
daddy wrote most of the responses under his son's name.
In another, actually quite amusing situation, the Web master of
the site for the Warburg and Courtauld Institute copied the layout and
design elements of the same site. He even left the named of the various
jpg and gif images the same. It's all changed now, which is quite sad, as
I was planning on listing the design as one of my publications!
Adrienne DeAngelis
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>
> Without doing some more research on it, I think that you need to be very
> careful in that this is fairly incorrect. I believe you are referring to one
> specific case (which I seem unable to find) with very specific
> circumstances. But that overall, the general principles of copyright apply.
> As already stated, copyright is in regards to a "creator" and not
> "creativity" - that is, "creator" of a "work". Indeed, Canadian Copyright
> uses the term "author" rather than "creator". There are various things which
> are not able to be copyright - lists, titles etc. But your web example above
> is particularly misleading. If you "created" the web page format/layout and
> someone else steals it and just inserts their own information, that is
> indeed a copyright infringement. It is not the information that is
> copyrighted, but the actual web page layout and format, which you created
> (or authored) - even if you used a programme to do it.
>
> tim
>
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