But naturally we are also curious on how we could benefit from this overt 'flattery', too. This started an active debate at the office with a couple of agreed upon points being made.

• POINT A: If a different web design shop is blatantly copying our work, they should at least let their client and us know that they are doing it. We should be acknowledged as the source of the "inspiration" and in some cases all of the code, and certainly they should stop reference assets on our servers :)
• POINT B: It's disconcerting that other web agencies could potentially be CHARGING customers for work they did not do. We would hate to be one of these clients thinking they are paying for original work - especially the creative.

But David, our CEO and Jesse, our Creative Director had a differing view:

"If people keep copying our site, often badly, why don't we release an open source version of our website to the creative commons? That would stop the low quality copy cats, give us some SEO juice, and hopefully inspire us to "up our game" with a new even better site design.

Many people in the office expressed agreement. "Great Idea, we should totally do that." My knee jerk reaction was to object. My perception was that if we released this "open source" version of our design (via creative commons), our site's uniqueness would all be flushed down the toilet as a hundred other "Ma and Pa" websites sprung up leveraging our design potentially with bad copy, inappropriate content and quite possibly many other factors I haven't even thought up. OK, let's boil this down to Pros and Cons:

Pros

• Increased exposure for Work at Play, even some link juice via the Creative Commons Attribution
• Decreasing the amount of low quality knockoffs of our Art Direction
• Increasing goodwill by helping the Web in general. This is consistent with our company value of making the web a better place.

Cons

• Goodbye unique design.
• We'll have to create another web design (which I suppose will keep us innovating)
• This may actually not stop the bad knockoffs, since it may just make it easier to Dr. Frankenstein the design

-- Oh Internets... I need advice. My CEO is super serious about packaging this up and releasing it via creative commons for the world to use. Do we white label and release our website to the creative commons? Have I properly summarized the Pros and Cons of this decision? Help me, Help You.