SKoriginals

I removed your post because the edit function is not working at the moment, and, contrary to your 'not trying' you succeeded in singling out 3 people with your links....mouse-over gave their names even without opening the links.

A couple of comments here:

#1 Stardock has Microsoft's permission for the Xbox 360 skin. I have personally demoed this skin to Microsoft and they are well aware of it.  What we weren't allowed to do is call it the official Microsoft Xbox 360 skin. But we have their okay to have an Xbox 360 skin. We talked to Microsoft BEFORE we posted it btw.  Of course, Jeff, if you think so lowly of us, feel free to take your stuff off the site and go away. You of all people know how seriously we take people's IP rights. It would have been a lot cheaper for us to not develop BootSkin and LogonStudio (both freeware) and instead just distribute the actual system files of Windows.  The only reason WindowBlinds doesn't natively support msstyles is because Microsoft requested we not -- before programs like Style XP existed.  We've sacrificed a great deal in honor people's intellectual property wishes.

#2 WinCustomize allows fan art.  So do most sites on the net.  To single WinCustomize out on the net seems a bit unreasonable.  I go to Google, Type Han Solo. Hundreds of pages of images. You don't like it. That's your right. But that doesn't make it illegal. Fan art on the Internet is a fact of life. The legality of it, at best is unknown. No one here is trying to sell copyrighted content.

#3 The moderation is done by unpaid volunteers.  Sometimes things slip through but we do make a good effort to try to protect people's intellectual property.

#4 We have always removed any works at the request of others if they could make a reasonable case that it violates their intellectual property rights.  We have even done this unilaterally.  For a long while, we forbid any Mac-like skins on the site even as commercial programs like Style XP bundled a Mac skin (and continue to do so to this day) which even have the Apple logo in them.  We don't pretend to be lawyers here. What we do know is that every skin site and fan site on the  net has much the same content.

#5 WinCustomize doesn't exist in a vacuum.  While there is certainly room to complain about boot screens that you feel have some trademark or other issue involved, other skin sites have boot screens that are not only the same in terms of content but are distributed as XP kernel files or in the case of logons are the actual logonui.exe's.  Complaining about WinCustomize while every other site is literally distributing patches .msstyles files, XP kernals, and logoinuis's seems very unreasonable too.  

#6 Similar to item #5, communities, websites, etc. cannot be compared to some imaginary, utopian ideal.  They are relative to other similar entities in reality.  Simpy put, there are no other major skin sites that are remotely as considerate of the intellectual property of others.