More DWBS

It's only a website people, nothing to bust a nut over. Did I go spouting legalities when Covaro's first site ripped the HTML coding straight off of the <a href="[url="http://members.aol.com/se7thson/superfly.html")Abode"]http://members.aol.com/se7thson/superfly.html")Abode[/url] of The SuperFly</a>?
No.
Just tell the schmuck that credit should be given where credit is due. And remember that mimicking is the most sincere form of flattery.

Firstoff, you can copyright CONTENT, you cannot copyright LAYOUT or STYLE -- *IF* you could copyright layout or style, then EVERY site that uses Frontpage's or DreamWeaver's or whatever major HTML package's default layout would be fighting over who had it first.

Look around before you spew nonsense, and take notice that just about every commercial site uses an out-of-the-box (or only slightly altered) layout from one of the bigname site editing packages (hell, when Frontpage first came out, everyone who used it built their sites with its exact default layout right down to its pukey default colours!) Now, if it were illegal to use the same layout, don't you think they'd be suing one another over it?

Gaaahh.. sometimes I want to smack all your collective heads together. :(

Sure, there may be some kind of default webpage layout on Dreamweaver of FP/FPE but thats cos its basically a "freeware" design. Its the same with some painings or pictures really. Theres the copyrighted ones and theres the free ones.

When somone copys a webpage as much as that german one, there would be a case.

What makes a painting a copyrightable work is the UNIQUE ORIGINAL CONTENT, not the style. Otherwise no one would be allowed to paint in, frex, Picasso's general style, or even in a broader category, frex "portraits".

The web is basically a daily magazine, and there are only so many ways to lay out a magazine. You can't copyright a conglomeration of HTML tags, no matter what order you put them in; that'd be like a magazine trying to copyright a certain combination of paper and ink. You CAN copyright the text and graphics you put between them, ie. the unique content which YOU generated.

And if you want to talk about ripoffs, doesn't anyone remember when Doomworld's layout changed, and for a while you couldn't tell if you were looking at Doomworld or Doomnation?