Copyright Aid

Hi,

I work for my families business in cyprus. Prior to my employment the company hired a web designer to create and maintain a website. they then wanted to rejig the site and so gave the designer a spec and they came back with a rough 1 page template of images with no code.

As i had previous experience in web design and just started working with the busienss i said that i may be able to create a new site instead of using the old webdesigner.

they Informed the web designer that they were transferring control in-house and offered to keep her on a a paid consultant (which she turned down).

I created a new site fully functional with 20+ pages.

Now here is the problem, that web designer has come back saying we have used her template to create our new site and she wants to be paid. Now i will honestly say that i did use some of the ideas of layout and basic style but other than that everything is made from scratch with different color codes, the text, the active button's and added a few other things into the mix.
also we prior notified that we may use some of her design idea's which she did not object to (at the time), and none of the info she sent over mentioned that it was copy protected.

with my limited knowledge of copyright i would think i am ok as i created it all myself, did not copy anything and there are a huge number of differences between the completed site and the template

Have a look for yourself i uploaded the pdf template to my webserver and have put the actual link to the live site below.

key-services.co.uk/Template.pdf

key-services.co.uk/index.html

Your help would be appretiated, i am just worried that i will need to pay someone for a site that i spent allot of time creating myself.

cheers

GJM

I have only had time to have a quick look at the PDF and the site, but they LOOK virtually identical, so I must conclude that regardless of the code changes you have made, you have clearly copied her design, I suggest that you either pay her to use her design, or re-design your site.

Thank you Warlock for your advice,

I am a little confused though, as everyday i see numerous copyrighted products that are almost identical, (trainers for instance exactly the same apart from a couple of minor astheticle design changes).

And if you look on the Web you find hundreds of sites that use the exact same site structure and colouring,

The reason the two sites look so similar is the images and text which are owned by KSL, the only thing that she created was the layout which as i am sure you will know is a very standard layout, (top banner, side banner and main content). so unless i changed all our copyrighted images and text, any website i build would have the same look and structure as the template she provided.

I would not want to rip off anyone elses work, but as i said before all she did was send a flat template whyle pitiching to build a complete site.

Your further advide would be appretiated.