Our Copyright Policy, and Pirates of Our Work
Copyright Policy
MQStudio™ and all of its contents are published under Copyright © 2003–2008 owned by Maria Q. Stultz.
All of this site's content, including but not limited to text, images, code, and visual design has been created by, and is the exclusive property of, Maria Q. Stultz and MQStudio.
No part of this site, or the assembled work displayed in this site, may be copied/reproduced, displayed, distributed, or used to create derivative work without the author's written permission.
These rights are protected by U.S. and International copyright law, and it is also our right and policy to publicly disclose the names of those who infringe on our valuable intellectual property rights.
If you have any questions regarding this policy, please ask us.
Pirates Don't Flatter Us
We are truly flattered if our work and ideas inspire others. However, there is a clear difference between inspiration and copyright infringement, and we take our intellectual property rights seriously. This page discloses the names of those who have copied our work (not our ideas) without our knowledge and permission, most of the time for commercial purposes.
MQstudios.co.uk
(Graphic Design Studio) Caught on: Sep 3, 2006
Does the name of this business sound confusingly similar to ours? Yes! It does. Not only has such web site copied eight to ten full paragraphs of our business copy word by word, but also, the U.K.-based business owned by Mr. Yaw Osafo-Ansong seems to be copying our business name to possibly free-ride on the online name recognition gained by our design studio.
View images and read full story at our blog »
Pixelstudios.at
(Graphic Design Studio) Caught on: Apr 8, 2005
Prior to MQStudio's 2005 redesign, we found an unauthorized clone of our web site at Pixelstudios.at. Pixelstudios copied our site's HTML, CSS, images, and even some text which was simply translated to German, word by word. Then they published a slightly modified version of our site as their business' website, explicitly claiming ownership of our work with a 2004 copyright notice attributed to Michael Patzal, owner of Pixelstudios.at, and <meta> tags identifying Mr. Patzal as the author of the web pages.
Nepsa.com
(Web Design Services) Caught on: Oct 25, 2004
Only 4 days after El Collar de Tomás was added as an official entry to the CSS Zen Garden, we found a clone of our design under development for a client's project, by a designer working for Nepsa.
This person [name removed 07/18/06], used the source HTML of the CSS Zen Garden, copied without our authorization our design's entire CSS along with the necessary background images, slightly tweaking code and graphics to come up with a modified but extremely similar design for her client. The CSS was tweaked just a bit further after we contacted Nepsa, and the finished product is currently displayed as an original potfolio sample in nepsa.com.
Note: The CSS for "El Collar de Tomás" is released under a Creative Commons license which clearly states that commercial use of it is not allowed and that credit must be attributed to the original author. Several individuals have used our work in compliance with the terms of the CC license, and we are ok with it.