Mambo Templates - Make sure it's legal

It's great to see so many people out there designing templates for Mambo Open Source...indeed, MOS is surely becoming one of the most usable and popular Content Management Systems available on planet Earth.

However, it would be helpful if we all observed some basic principles when desigining templates for Mambo, to make sure we do not get stung in the future (remember Serence?)...

It is extremely tempting to take key graphics and layout from a well known website and create or modify into a template for Mambo. We have been there - we look at many sites on a daily basis to see what features and mods we can add to make our templates more exciting and fun. How easy? Just browse to the website you like and save the page from IE or Navigator - simple, easy, quick, and against the law (if you create a template from those files).

We looked at Qarbon (www.qarbon.com) - the guys behind ViewletBuilder - and we really liked their site - so much so that we were going to make a template called 'Qarbon Copy' and run it on the site - then we had a reality check and realised that this was in fact an infiringement of copyright, and that we, and anyone who downloaded and used the template, could get in serious trouble for doing so.

Here's what the legal blurb says on the Qarbon site:

Intellectual Property; Limited License to Users The Materials and Services on this Site, as well as their selection and arrangement, are protected by copyright, trademark, patent, and/or other intellectual property laws, and any unauthorized use of the Materials or Services at this Site may violate such laws and the Terms of Use. Except as expressly provided herein, Qarbon.com, Inc. and its suppliers do not grant any express or implied rights to use the Materials and Services. You agree not to copy, republish, frame, download, transmit, modify, rent, lease, loan, sell, assign, distribute, license, sublicense, reverse engineer, or create derivative works based on the Site [emaphasis mine] , its Materials, or its Services or their selection and arrangement, except as expressly authorized herein. In addition, you agree not to use any data mining, robots, or similar data gathering and extraction methods in connection with the Site.

We quickly dropped the idea and realised that in order to be sure that there would be no legal implications regarding our templates, we desinged them from scratch and had the files to prove it.
All of the images used are from paid stock, or authorised by our clients.

The message here is please be careful - using someone's brand to make your template look good is probably in breach of copyright and ultimately serves a harsh penalty - in the UK or US (or anywhere in the world for that matter).