Apparently his comments don’t work either, figures.

Maybe a quick whois search will reveal his email address for you Chris.

What a putz!!! Stealing from a real genius, just shows how low you truly are…do us a favor and leave, just drop everything and leave, find your purpose, but don’t be a thief. Clearly you are in the wrong. Please desist!!!! Chris I hope everything goes well with red curtain…Good luck man!

Hey, he rips your design :(, and only to write “saddsadsasa” and “sub cat post” :(.

Geez, this for sure fits in the asshat category. Some people have quite the nerve don’t they. Hope he sees this post and takes that down asap.

Thanks for the kind words guys.

I want to make something clear though, I don’t consider myself a genius, or a great designer or anything like that.

This is just about fair use and doing the right thing. If he had come to me and asked for some help or for some pointers I would have given as much of my time as I could. As many of you know I love to give back to the WordPress community in any way that I can.

It’s just frustrating having your work summarily ripped, you know?

Whois lookup reveals the registrant e-mail address as john.benfield@dial.pipex.com.

kzinti,
Yeah I know that is the email addy that doesn’t work.

Chris, I send the webmaster a polite little email today, but still haven’t had any replies.
Will keep you posted.

It is sometimes difficult to keep up with the distinctions between various licenses and strict copyright. It is possible (though unlikely) that he thought your current design, like other designs you’ve used, was licensed under cc or something similar. He does put your copyright notice at the bottom (improperly, I note, since the design will have a different copyright than the entire blog). Clearly, it matters not, since you gave not your permission to use the current design. I’m just saying, perhaps he’s not an ass but a dumbass.

Man, that really sucks. What else can I say. I hope he gets the message by now.

Good luck Chris.

Basil,

That is my hope as well, which is why I was giving him time to do the right thing, before I took anymore drastic steps.

Apparently some of my boys have got my back, and have already done that for me… I.m looking at YOU Indranil.

I still can’t get to the turd’s site.

Chris, you have beautiful work. People should be inspired by it, but not copy it.

I’ll kick his butt for you :)

Hmm…not sure if anything has changed on that site since you posted the story, Chris, but in the footer on his site (2200 hrs Mountain time, Feb 24) your name is very clearly there listing you as the designer.

Is that a change from earlier? I hope so.

Wow, that doesn’t resemble your site a bit Chris… LOL

Asshat

Bad bad guy! At least, he’ve now switched to Kubrick…ASSHAT!

and in summary….

“butthole…putz…turd…asshat…ASSHAT!”

I ♥ designer sympathy-anger.

I shall add “womble”.

I am currently ‘playing’ with Wordpress see what how things work. It is not my intention to use code developed by someone else without their permission.

Why didn’t he ask Chris then? Puh!

He seems well-intentioned but quite ill-informed. As you said, Chris, he’s done the right thing.

Well, this is the said “butthole…putz…turd…asshat…ASSHAT” and various other things. As you can see from my mail response to Indranil it was not my intention to steal/rip or whatever Chris’s design. As you see from the type of blogs in the side, it’s not a live site and is not intended to be one. I did use Chris’s style sheet on it, however the coding behind it is mine, with some of Chris Persian code.

Anyway, lesson learnt and I shall cease and desist.

Hey John,

Thanks for coming buy. The point was always that it was bad form to use the stylesheet without asking for permission.

As I said above, I appreciate your prompt action on this, and I am happy to help you if you ever need it.

Wonderful question Paul, Allow me to retort.

First lets look at some of what I have said in on this post already.

This is just about fair use and doing the right thing. If he had come to me and asked for some help or for some pointers I would have given as much of my time as I could. As many of you know I love to give back to the WordPress community in any way that I can.

It’s just frustrating having your work summarily ripped, you know?

The point has always been that without permission, which is what is required when a piece of work is copyrighted, John was using my code.

Now Shawn, he came to me and asked for my opinion, and if I thought that the layout was too much like mine, meaning had he crossed the line from “inspired by” to “ripped off from”. The difference is that Shawn came to me to let me know what was going on and allowed me to decide if I had a problem with it. Had he not, we would have seen a Shawn Grimes Ripped Me Off post.

Had John gone about things in the proper manner, more like Shawn, I would have gladly shared some of my CSS with him, and helped in anyway I could. He did not.

Also Shawn did not copy my CSS, he merely picked up on some of my styling choices and emulated them while maintaining his own visual identity, which again, John did not.

So yeah, to me, that is the difference. Hope this makes sense, and thanks again for the question Paul, this needed to be spoken about!

Hmm, I must be psychic. Some how I knew this question would come up. I truly hope people are not seeing my design as a rip of your site Chris. Really the only similarities are the font stylings. But even those have different sizes. I’m using a plugin that Chris released for my comments text, and yes those are displayed under the title like Chris’s are. But, the page does not function the same as Sillyness does, my comments look nothing like this (except for the author structure, which Chris recommended to everyone), I have tabbed navigation, Chris has a simple list. So Paul, although a good question, I don’t really see how mine could even be put in the same category with the other unless you consider font styling and white space to be a Sillyness ©

As Chris did mention though, I kept in contact with him through my layout process to make sure I wasn’t hitting to close to home. Again though, that was a good question.

Argh. Pardon the following vent: inspiration is okay, but do admit/credit. Using another stylesheet is indeed theft, as is explained via the poem-analogy. The words are free to use, the composition makes it what it is. Shawn’s site is nice as it is, and I admire it that he actually mentions his inspiration (not that I didn’t expect you not to), which is sadly a rare thing — -many steal.

Anyways, you catch my drift. Glad that John came and explained it.

Wow stealing a theme? That is just plain wrong. I of course can’t code much so I use the stock Wordpress theme but I will never steal something from anyone.

I just hope the guy was just testing stuff out and didn’t mean to steal.

Whoops the last comment was by C when I meant to put CarLBanks. Sorry about that.

Looks like he is back to Kubrick.