Could I get in legal trouble for copying a website's stylesheet? [closed]

Question

I like the simplistic look and design of some of the Microsoft blogs. Alas, I can't join the Microsoft dev party and create my own development blog on the blogs.msdn.com page because I don't work at Microsoft, and I already have my own wordpress blog.

I was looking to have my blog styled to one of the default looking themes shown here: http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/default.aspx

Could Microsoft take legal action against me if I used a stylesheet from their page? If I made my page 'based' off their stylesheet, e.g. written from the ground up, would that be copyright infringement?

Answer 1

Could Microsoft take legal action against me if I used a stylesheet from their page?

Absolutely, since you infringed their copyright. On the other hand, it's debatable whether the stylesheet alone constitues a sufficient threshold of originality to justify legal actions¹. At the least, taking without asking is often considered rude. ;-)

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¹⁾ No. It certainly doesn't. A sophisticated design however will.

Answer 2

Yes, you can get in legal trouble for copying a site's stylesheet since it's typically a copyright violation. Worse, you could get publicly bashed on blogs like youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com, making such blog posts about you high-ranked Google results for your name, thus tarnishing your reputation irreversibly.

Don't do it, it's not worth the risks.