I wanted to post this right now, being that I should have done it months ago when I ran into this fiasco; but I simply didn't take the time or make an effort to bring it anyone's attention.

In May, I was contacted by a company claiming stating that they were taking another company to court for plagiarism. The case was against this company's web site having been "heavily inspired or created through the manipulation or alteration of more than 50%" of the plaintiffs' web site. The reason I was contacted was because the site accused of plagiarism was a web site using my "Lucky" template released back in February.

When this company contacted me, I immediately sought out the contact information for the accused and demanded an explanation. After verifying the facts presented to me by both companies, I ultimately made the decision to ask this individual to remove the credit to the design from his web site. Afterwards, I sent an e-mail to the company that had contacted me regarding the plagiarism and reminded them that any further contact of this nature would result in a suit to claim damages per lost wages, harassment, and pain and suffering, and could result in the company being indicted on attempted duress should they threaten financial harm to myself or the founder of the accused business in the future.

The reason why I am giving you guys this information is to protect you. Regardless of OD.org's policy, other companies may deem the templates used by our viewers as copies of their own web sites.

I urge you all to consider placing a viewer's agreement at the bottom of your templates to help prevent you from being held responsible or being pulled into a mess like the one I was involved with.

If someone gets a template from OD and uses it for a business, that's perfectly fine. Each template has a license to it, so depending on that gives the user specific rights on how to use or change the design.

I don't see how someone can sue you if you've used a design from OD.

Now if someone copied the text from a site using an OD template, that's different. Text/Copy is something that can be copyrighted and protected against plagiarism but if you are using a free template from OD, I'm not sure they can sue over the design.

This would be caused by places doing what Dream Template did. In the end, it just creates a mess.