Editorial - Creation Without Plagiarism

When I first started looking up Dragonball on the internet, I found many elite sites. Wow, I thought, my site will never be as good as that! I found a host, learnt HTML, and started building a site. I remained original, with new content, my own graphics, and an appealing layout. I wasn't at this level with graphics and design languages when I first began, heck I didn't even know the most basic forms of HTML.

Still, after about half a year of hard work, my site has gotten to what it is today. I still have to work on it a lot, and make it better. The way I see it, this is how everyone should start making websites. But certain people want to be the best in like one week, and use whatever method it will take to have a good site. They'll steal content, layouts, parts of layouts (such as how you update), and like the whole style of other webpages. So what, they might say, that isn't plagiarism.

So when a webmaster tells them not to steal his layout, they say something like the layout isn't patented, copyrighted, etc. and that if it's on the internet then anyone can take it. I personally find this really damn annoying, and anyone who does this should be subjected to various methods of torture. Anyway, when the webmaster finally gives the layout up, he/she makes a new one, with like the exact same style as the other webmasters. Also, he/she actually manages to get to an average level with graphics, and makes his/her own banner with cheap effects such as like five lens flares.

Then (obviously proud of him/herself), the person talks to the other webmaster, disses their site, and then ends the conversation. So, in short, I'd like to say that people who start making websites by stealing, copying, and other things like this, please stop. It's obvious that your site won't ever get popular, not to mention all the flames you'll get. If you know that this is you, then please start again with new content, without copying anybody's site, and don't act like an asshole.