U.K. Prime Minister's Website Accused of Copyright Infringement

The official website of the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown doesn't give credit for the Wordpress theme used by its makers, as Anthony Baggett, a former web designer, claims on his blog. The man, who lives in Mississippi, has created several themes for Wordpress pages, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license, which allows third parties to use the products under this license free of charge. The only condition is that those who decide to use a theme created by someone else have to give them credit. A link to an online location that is determined by each author is immediately available in the footer.

The author of the NetWorker theme admits that Gordon Brown's website looks almost entirely different from those which generally use the recurrent pattern. But this is no excuse for the copyright infringement, as Baggett says, because the Creative Commons 3.0 license stipulations are clear: no matter the modifications, credit must be given to the right author.

"I sent an email to the company in charge of developing the website (New Media Maze) to try and work this out privately. They claim that they tested the NetWorker theme, but then rebuilt it from scratch. Although they rebuilt it from scratch, they failed to remove the credits in the CSS file that name the theme 'NetWorker' or to change the theme folder which is named 'NetWorker-10' (Networker version 1.0)," explains Baggett.

Despite his public assertions, there are skeptics who say that the resemblance between the two themes is null, or, at the very most, is caused by some lines in the code that coincidentally correspond. "There is very little, if anything, in the home page source which could have been generated from Anthony's original PHP code. And especially, the footer of the page is not generated by Anthony's code (even without the copyright notice)," comments a blogger on Baggett's page.