Late last night, I heard from Matt Craven that one of Jason Chris “Wicked Web Designer” Pearson’s more famous Wordpress themes, Cutline, had been aped as someone else’s . That someone else had the temerity to not only call it is his own , but proclaim how long he had spent on working on it, and how it wasn’t yet available for public release.

Cutline, as you may already know, has been in wide circulation for months, and is even distributed with some versions of Wordpress — and although it follows a creative commons license, requires that there is some attribution with its release and reformations.

Now, the good news: within hours of this ass-hat-ery being published and known, the original author owned up to his errors and made efforts to make things right.

This is good.

But the question that I’m wondering is — what happened if it wasn’t Jason Chris Pearson that got ripped off?

That is, what happened if there was someone less loved? Or, someone simply less known?

What happened if there was no community to rally around the intellectual property victim?

The answer’s obvious.

In some cases, the rip off artist (turdburglar?) might acquiesce and do the “right thing”; but I suspect in many cases, without the pressure of a ton of bloggers coming down on that individual like a mountain of bricks, many rippers of IP would probably do nothing at all, short of some legal threats.

With that said, this isn’t the first time that someone’s design was stolen, and it won’t be the last.

I think that the whole kerfuffle makes for the strong case for “herd immunity”. In medicine, “Herd Immunity” often refers to the protective effects that immunizing an entire population can have on protecting individuals who are not vaccinated.

In the blogosphere, “herd immunity”, I think needs to refer to a bunch of like minded individuals looking out for each other — so that when something is stolen, the victim will at least have the recourse of his or her friends to help out, as in the case of Mr. Pearson.

Now, clearly there’s a dark side to this — when the friends can turn into the mob, and things start running amok, turning things into a flame / blog / mudslinging war.

But at least the rip-ee will have a voice.

And I think it makes the case for bloggers — getting involved, being friendly, having friends and giving to a community isn’t just good traffic sense (so that you’ll get inbound links improving your Google Juice). Its Machiavellian, but being part of the herd affords you protection, particularly when you create intellectual property.

Which is great for Jason Chris Pearson.

And not so good for Charlie Pabst.