Well, I think you're on the right track, but you've got a lot of work to do before you can call these awesome. ;)
For starters, the door on your scratch house is far too small and misplaced. It should be roughly one tile wide and tall, and be lined up as such, like the edited one. I also think that your trees' anatomies are a little strange, but trees are difficult, so keep working at those.
The main problem I see, though, is your shading. You seem to be using your darker colours to provide detail, and on your trees, using lighter dots as shading is not good.
I would recommend looking at Chesu's tutorial on shading that's stickied in this forum, and making things bigger. Those two key things should improve your sprites a lot, and then you can work on smaller nuances of technique later. :)
RE: The copyright debate
Many of you are confusing the terms "copyright" and "intellectual property". The former does indeed require a patent to be filed, but the latter is something that applies to all works made by a person. It's illegal to steal IP, but the creator can agree to sell it to another person or company, or let them use it. However, it's very difficult to track things like this on the internet.
In some cases their IP immediately goes to a company of that kind. For anyone interested, there was a very interesting case about that in Japan involving the man who invented a method of creating blue light from an LED. Anyway, this is way OT. xD
