Using someone else code?

[rv20]

If you were to download a page, maybe change a few things, banner, couple of graphics and obvioulsy the text, but generally the sites layout and graphics fit what you need, who is going to know, would you really get sued for this?

[roopurt18]

If you want a real answer, then consult a lawyer who specializes in such things.

 

If you were to scrape a page one time just to generate your layout, then probably no one would know or care all that much.

 

If you were constantly scraping it so that you can update your template as they update yours, then yes they would eventually find out.  The first clue would be access logs to their site from yours that fit a pattern.  If I suspected someone were scraping my page constantly to use my layout as theirs, I would embed something in my source HTML and then see if it shows up in theirs.

[JonnoTheDev]

This happens all the time to our sites. You can tell as the CSS classes and ids are the same names. The only issue is when someone trys to construct a competitor site using our layout. I don't think that there is a problem with taking the source to copy the layout as long as the content is not taken. I would however change HTML element ids, etc as Google may pick up on this.

[haku]

It's theft, pure and simple. And people get found out for it all the time. If they find your real name attached to your site anywhere, they will put out 'google bombs' on your name so that when anyone searches for your name, they will find something like "____ is a thief".