I'm not talking about current U.S. copyright legislation. First off, I don't agree with the concept that anyone has the right to 'own' information in the first

I'm not talking about current U.S. copyright legislation. First off, I don't agree with the concept that anyone has the right to 'own' information in the first place (especially lines of code). It isn't 'stealing'. It's not as if they have deprived hackermonthly of their site. At worst they copied. I'm not sure what you are saying in regards to CSS being 'open source'. My point was that between syntax and formatting standards, CSS has very little creative control (in terms of the actual writing of the code). Sure you might decide to do 4 space indents, choose one line rules vs. multiple, etc. But usually there is a best way, or most standards compliant way of structuring and styling the design. What I'm saying is two people coding the same design could easily produce nearly identical code, with the only differences being small irrelevant differences in formatting.