Thursday, August 14, 2008

Has Downing Street claimed Crown copyright on stolen code?

Interesting stuff in the depths of the new Dowing Street website. The theme for the site has a CSS file that references its source as antbag.com which calls the theme Networker.

However there is no reference to it and the Copyright of antbag.com has been removed on the Number 10 site. What's more, the Downing Street site is also claiming Crown Copyright on the site which is clearly not the case.

Put's the whole "Knock-off Nigel" stuff into perspective huh? Perhaps it should be renamed "Knock-off Gordon"?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I also notice that the theme is described in the comments as "An adsense ready theme"

Is the government so short of cash that is about to start sticking Google Adsense banner ads on their websites?

Anonymous said...

Following the link to antbag.com one finds a small business that provides themes for Wordpress on a "donate what you think its worth" basis. (some quite nice designs)

No 10 can legitimately claim copyright on the content of the site, but unless they have paid to acquire the copyright to the design then their action in removing Antbag's copyright notices and then claiming Crown copyright is theft of the highest order.

Do you want to organise a whip round to help Anthony to start legal action?

Liam Murray said...

Reminds me of being 'called to account' by Tim I on making a similar mistake on Iain's template when I left social networking widgets leeching from the BBCs bandwidth - naughty boy that I was.

dizzy said...

Shame on you! I still think my copyright statement is the best.

John M Ward said...

Dunno about knock-off Gordon -- I prefer "Clear off, Gordon!"

Website coding has become such a complex affair nowadays, that I imagine it can sometimes be difficult to work out who owns or controls what, when sites are assembled/designed from a whole selection of free and/or non-free tools.

Still, it's fun to keep an eye of stuff like this going on in the corridors of power...

Anonymous said...

Hi guys, I'm the theme author and can't find any record of them paying for the theme. I'm not sure at this point what my options are, but I'm looking into it.