ask to steal my design, will you?

This email was a first for me:

May I steal your design?

Hey
I'm designing my personal website, and I really liked your page layout on http://www.alexisohanian.com. Is it chill if I more or less copy it? You would, of course, get cited in the page source. You can see my rendition at: [redacted] . The site isn't yet complete, and I still haven't made it index.html, so nobody's seen it yet.
Thanks,
[redacted]

I didn't even think people visited that website, let alone wanted to gank the design. He even had the courtesy to email to ask if it was OK. What's happened to the Internet lately?

So as you can imagine, here was my response:

Re: May I steal your design?

Who the fuck do you think you are emailing me? Don't you know who I am? Of course you can't use my design ideas. I invented them. I own them all.

That shade of green I use, #90EE90 -- that hexadecimal -- belongs to me. The line-spacing, the small caps, the background-color property on the hover, they're all the property of Alexis Ohanian.

What if everyone went around "getting inspired by" (i.e., stealing) other people's designs? Huh? Real creativity would die, that's what.

Thanks for putting a rusty shiv in the abdomen of creativity. Jerk.

UPDATE: Judging by the comments below, I see a few of you didn't realize this was a joke (and that I didn't actually send that reply). But thank you for articulating your thoughts. To reinforce my point and prove that I'm not in fact that much of a jerk, I've included my actual reply.

Re: May I steal your design?

hey [redacted],

By all means, gank away.

I do appreciate you letting me know, though. There's that cliche about imitation and flattery :) so I'm quite happy you've decided to borrow some of my ideas. It's totally chill.

-Alexis