[tetrad]

> Any designer would look at Flat UI and immediately realize that they drew inspiration from LayerVault. The similarities aren't minor, in either style, tone, or techniques.

What it boils down to is that there was no actual copyright infringement. If you look at the side-by-sides of the alleged infringement, it's kind of silly.

Even laying aside the heart of the issue, did they "rip off" the gear icon, the newspaper icon, or the chat icon? Did they "rip off" the general color scheme or look-and-feel? Or are those merely representative of a minimalist flat school of design which is currently in vogue?

How many freelance designers would you have to contract to make a "settings" icon, or an "interlocking gears" icon before you got back a (clean-room) design which looked even more like LV's than the one in question? Same goes for the newspaper and the chat icon. And is there any direct inspiration going on there (designer laying eyeballs on LV's design and then drawing ours a day or a month later) - probably not. And we could make the designs all clustered a lot tighter if we specifically asked for one that used very few high-contrast colors or a "flat" style.

If you then presented 10 of these farmed-out icon designs to a panel of designers, and told them that some of them had been ripped off of others, they would probably have some pretty strong opinions on which those were. And they would be wrong.