On 1 March we released a free Wordpress theme named Bubbles. The theme is very popular now and has already been downloaded 100’s of times.

Just after its release we are receiving threatening mails from a site named applegazette.com that we shall remove the theme from our website.

Read the unprofessional email that they sent to us:

This is a blatant rip off of our(Bloggy Network LLC) design at applegazette.com. Stop releasing this theme or I will take further action, including leaving multiple negative reviews about you at every web hosting directory on the internet.

-Jacob

I was surprised to see how arrogant they are.

They say they will post false negative reviews about our hosting services.

After that we sent a mail to them:

In Web Design you can use other websites as inspiration and using different elements from different good websites in your own design.

Now digg, myspace etc cannot claim or sue other websites which are working on the same concept and are having same type of design.

Our design has a lot of different elements from Apple Gazette’s design. The only closely similar element between our design and yours, is the header, although even that looks different, since yours fade to white, whilst our design is a solid gradient color.

In fact our design is a lot different from there’s - below is a list of the differences:

1) Solid gradient header, with the diagonal lines at the back

2) The search bar looks different

3) The date badge

4) The post meta data is displayed differently

5) The comments tab at the bottom of every post

6) The bottom bar is not existent on Apple Gazette’s design

So there’s just 6 differences already, compared to the one that you are complaining about. The headers to have similar shapes, but a shape cannot be copyrighted and neither can you complain about this.

There are no laws stating that small details from a website’s design cannot be copied. We did not copy any designs outright and therefore we have not breached any copyright, ethical or moral laws.

 

And now today again we received the email from them:

I have given you plenty of time to remove the theme. I will now act on what I said.

Thanks,

Jacob

This emails shows their level of frustration and desire to prove themeselves a big company and wants to misuse their power.

They don’t want any other blog user to use a theme which is in someway similar to them.

Only the shape of the theme(at the top) is common. I wonder applegazette.com will now send such emails to all other blog owners claiming that nobody can use oval or rectangular shapes in their theme as they are already using it on their blog.

Our is free resolution theme while theirs is a fixed reolution theme which again is avery big difference.

There are thousands of wordpress themes available and you will find many are 90% similar to each other.

LOL, applegazette you need to be more professional otherwise nobody is going to visit your blogs, ultimately no clicks on your adsense ads.

You people claim to be a part of a big blog network. But now in actual it looks like that you guys are just a bunch of arrogant and unprofessional people and nothing else.

These people seems to be more interested in publishing false reviews about other companies instead of working on their own blogs.

Beware all bloggers as you could be the next target of applegazette.

However this is not going to stop us from releasing more themes and templates in future.

I hope all other bloggers will support us so that in future no company can send such unprofessional and threatening mails to other bloggers.