I think what LayerVault has done is awful too! I wasn't trying to defend them at all. I just didn't agree with the idea that designers are less open than develo

I think what LayerVault has done is awful too! I wasn't trying to defend them at all. I just didn't agree with the idea that designers are less open than developers. Flat-UI and LayerVault may be riding a trend but neither one can claim ownership of anything except the exact assets they've created. There might be a fine line where a color scheme is used in such a way where it can be construed as plagiarism or maybe the icons were recreated from scratch to look exactly like LayerVault's but still preserving plausible deniability and those cases I might be able to get behind Layervault being upset. I liken it to Queen suing Vanilla Ice for using their riff in 'Ice Ice Baby' or how that one One Direction song sounds almost exactly like the Clash song whose name escapes me right now. In those cases it's just plain obvious the artist was trying to sample someone else's music but changed the riff just enough to be able to call it their own. And that brings me to the subjective part. The developer in me hates that there's not an exact answer to the question "When does inspiration become plagiarism" but that's life.