British Government Caught Pirating On Prime Minister’s Website - TorrentFreak

So imagine Anthony’s surprise when he discovered that his NetWorker theme for WordPress had been used by the British government without honoring the Creative Commons license. The theme has been heavily modified, including the removal of all links back to his site, but Anthony has been able to verify from the source files that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s own website is in fact built on NetWorker.

Not only have they illegally appropriated Anthony’s WordPress theme, the company who “developed” the site tried to deny the claim that it was originally their creation, and they only used his design for inspiration. However they forgot to clean the code thoroughly and they left in Anthony’s NetWorker credits at the end of the CSS source.

I think the final insult in the entire situation is that the government slaps their own Crown Copyright on the work, which is clearly someone else’s.

For a country that has nearly as backwards of a view of copyright and intellectual property laws as the U.S. does, this is quite an amusing mistake by the U.K. government. Unfortunately, the piracy is far too esoteric for the common public to understand, so it’s unlikely to gain any traction in the mainstream press.