In a word, YES.
To properly enforce one's claim to Intellectual Copyright one cannot play favourites, that means any and ALL sites hosting questionable content must be approached with equal diligence ....something that has NOT been the case with this/these particular 'issues'.
To be specific, Microsoft requested by name one skin be removed. It was.
In 2000 Apple requested one specific skin be removed [before Wincustomize.com]. It was.
If an OS company were to post an edict to each and every public/private skinning site to remove any and all imagery in any way originating from/related to their OS retrospectively and hence forth it would be complied with.
Apple 'might' do that....to its own detriment.
Microsoft won't. It would be silly to even want to.
The thing about copyright is that once the rights have been allowed to erode over time then legally the 'horse has bolted' - you can forget the barn door.
Microsoft's request relating to just one skin throughout the history of skinning is clear testament to where they TOO see where the 'horse is at'... |
Well said.
Here's the thing about intellectual property and the net: It is up to the copyright holder to protect their stuff.
WinCustomize will go out of its way to try to protect copyright holders. No other site of this kind on the net is as proactive as we are.
But at the same time, WinCustomize is a business. And people want this stuff and other sites, that now dwarf WinCustomize in traffic (like deviantART -- we used to get more traffic than dA, now they get 100X as much as us) are full of this stuff.
Case in point of something that won't happen again:
In 2001, Stardock figured out how to allow users to use .msstyles without having to patch any system DLLs. This was before any such patches existed.
Microsoft did the same thing they recently did with Kol's skin. They asked us to A) Not support msstyles in WindowBlinds and 
Not support msstyles on WinCustomize.com.
We complied with that. And where did that get us? Little start-ups like TGT Soft and ThemeXP and deviantART ate our lunch. The entire msstyle "market" could have been with Stardock. We could have had SkinStudio supporting msstyles and WinCustomize being the place to get them. But we went along with Microsoft's request. Did Microsoft ever go after TGT Soft or ThemeXP or deviantART? Nope.
That won't happen again. You can bet under Vista we'll support any sort of msstyles or other mods to the OS regardless of what Microsoft thinks if any other site has them. That goes for Vista skins.
