Is it cool to copy?

[odysseus]

Hi everyone. I was surfing through a few link lists just now checking out what other people are submitting and such. I came across a free site that had the exact same recip table as me. I'm not really perterbed by it, but I do have to say it took me some time searching for quality LL's to submit to and making up a recip table that I think looks nice with the sites I submit. This free site has the exact same code for their recip tables as me (right down to my HTML comments), and I'm not using the recips provided by LL's. I made the table myself. I Spent a good number of hours when I started doing free sites looking for lists and reading (yes, actually reading) the rules of each one. The rest of the site looks nothing like my sites, so I'm not really mad, just wondering if this is considered kosher or not.

I'm wondering if this is common practice, if it's rude, or if I'm just being overly pissy about it because a few link lists declined my last site. I think it was declined because of problems with the recip, even though they've listed other sites of mine with the exact same recip table. It looks like they also just copied and pasted the CSS to go with it too.

I don't know, taking inspiration from someone is one thing, but copying and pasting code... Am I just being childish by being a little bothered?