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Recently I gave a presentation to a team, and on the first slide I used my colleague's ppt template for my introduction. Now she is accusing me of piracy.
Is it wrong to use a general template design from your peer?
I told her that I liked the template and decided to make one like hers. She seemed upset. Is it naïve or a valid point to argue on?
She also has some personal beef with me.
If you are in college, and you do this without permission then it is plagiarism or in your words "piracy".
Doing the same kind of thing, at work, is called teamwork and smart.
Whenever you create a document for work, your best be is to start with a particularly well received document that has similar content to the one you are to provide. Use that as a baseline and add your specific content. Just like you did...
In this situation I would send out an email to everyone who was in the meeting that goes something like this:
Hi team
You may have noticed the wonderful power point template I used for our meeting the other day. Shame on me, but I did not give credit to "Joann" who created this template. I was so taken back by how wonderful it looked my eagerness forgot to give her credit.
Her creativity and artistic flair is unmatched and I thank her for allowing me to use it. Great job "Joann" you are a real asset to our team!
Sending such an email should eliminate all hard feelings.
Btw if she created the template on work time, using the work PowerPoint license, or a work computer, then the template is owned by the company not her. So you are well within your rights to use it. Being nice helps smooth over any hard feelings.
Is it wrong to use general template design from your peer?
If it's a corporate template created by the Marketing department (or marketing person, or your boss) then it's normally published somewhere that's available for all employees to use. A colleague might even create a template for your team, and deliberately publish it somewhere for everyone to use. Using these templates is normally fair game, and is often preferred because it gives a consistent brand identity across all presentations by the team / company, especially when presenting to external customers.
However, from your description it sounds like your colleague spent time and effort creating a unique design for her own use that she felt helped her deliver presentations to her internal colleagues with more impact, and you simply co-opted it into your own presentations without even asking for permission.
That's pretty inconsiderate because now her presentations look like yours and in the worst case without any attribution people might even think she copied your presentation.
You might argue that in a workplace, everything created by staff is owned by the company, but colleagues still have feelings, so normal social rules still apply - if you take something that's not yours without permission people are going to get upset with you.
The best thing you can do is try to heal your working relationship by apologising for not asking first, and tell her it won't happen again. Hopefully she'll see that you're the sort of person who tries to put things right when you make a mistake and will give you another chance...
My first thought is that the template is generally secondary to the information held within.
E.g. It's not plagiarism so long as you are changing the content.
However, A particularly well-made Template that took a lot of time and effort to make and not giving any attribution to the Author would be considered rude.
Especially if you didn't ask if you could use it first.
I'm assuming during the presentation you didn't acknowledge who authored the template.
In which case, I think it's fair to say that an Apology is owed - next time you want to use one of their templates - ask first and then ask how they would like to be acknowledged 'And in this presentation, I will be using the wonderful template prepared by my Co-Worker' (yes, it's a little cringe to say - but you can work out the fine details yourself).
If you are working for the same company, then whatever you produce (certainly in company time) probably belongs to the company.
That is, the template design is not hers anyway. Even it was, she would have to copyright it and you would have to copy it from her. I dont see you you could copyright the layout of a ppt presentation anyway.
