on December 8th, 2006Please respect our copyrights !
Recently I am seeing a couple of new websites popping up, that want to make a quick buck by using other people’s talent.
Yes. Those people are not creating new themes by themselves. They just download themes from other site and host it on their server. The worst part of that is, they add their own links also into the footer.
Oh My God !
We put so much time and effort into each one of our themes, and all of a sudden, someone will just take it, add their link in the footer, and put it up on their site.
How cruel it is !!!
I posted a comment on one of such websites and there were no reply, but they did not stop.
I will give them one more day to fix this issue, or I will expose them in the coming days.
You tell me What I should do with this kind of people !?? This really irritates me.
That is extremely dishonest and unethical. I’ll tell you what, the kind of person who does something like that will probably ignore your requests, so, ok, give them a deadline, but don’t expect this to work. What is annoying though, is that even if you go after the host and report copyright infringement, they might just change hosts and this ends up being an endless chase, unless you take legal action. This sounds to me like someone trying to increase their Page Rank or something to that effect. There are other variations of this theme (pun intended) going on, disguised as “based on on _____ theme by _____” that are questionable too, in my opinion (not all cases, but some). I definitely see where you’re coming from. Good luck with this and to this person (or these people) doing that, shame on you. Instead of using your creativity to come up with such a “trick”, try redirecting this “creative” energy into something that adds value, and not subtracts from other people’s efforts.
That really sucks. Sometimes the only way to stop this sort of thing is taking legal action. Wether you can stop them completely pretty much comes down to how many resources you are willing to spend.
Another thing you could to is camapign against piracy. spread the news that people should be careful where they spend their money. If the website sells pirated themes, who knows what they’ll do to your creditcard….
I hear a friend say.Your this multiuser BLOG is quite good.Excuse me, is the download address over there?I don’t understand English, canning not find the download address.
Is another mold version download address over there?
Thanks.
(Now is the writing that uses the translation software translation)
Hi Sadish,
We may not be able to control all or the individual itself. Publishing their sites is one thing – probably someone who is popular as well and then you can definitely expose them, if not it will be free publicity for them.
Other thing that we can do is, create the functions/css id’s and wherever possible to append the names with wpthemes.info.header or so and so. And commented description such as “Stolen from WPthemes.info” when we do the theme itself.
This way if legitimate people work on the theme they will always get to know from where the theme originated from. And the people who loot also have to rework on the theme to remove those names and as well we can do minimal cryptography so that if they remove wpthemes.info and change it, it might not work for them when the page loads which uses our theme.
We can talk about this in detail later.
Regards,
Shiva
Hello Sadhish,
There are several things you can do. Lorelle on Wordpress has some of the best information on how to deal with copyright violations.
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/what-do-you-do-when-someone-steals-your-content/
The above is the best one in my opinion. Good luck and do NOT let them get away with this!
Moridin
I can’t imagine how frustrating that may be. It’s not only unfortunate for you but also the people who legitimately benefit from your efforts. I know that without your efforts my new blog wouldn’t look half as good as it does now.
Best of Luck,
Todd
Please read my follow up at http://wpthemes.info/posts/2006/12/11/shame-on-this-guy/
Did you get my email?
Hi Sadish,
This is Melvin, the owner of the website you mentioned.
First and foremost, I want to publicly apologize to you for whatever infringement of copyright that I’ve caused.
Secondly, I didn’t reply to your comments earlier because I rarely check it out as currently I’m outsourcing the task of posting those themes to someone else. I’ve blocked all submissions by my freelancer till this matter is clarified.
The reason I created the blog was to highlight wordpress templates available. That’s not wrong, I presume. What’s wrong I believe, is making them available for download at my website directly and having a link back to my site as well.
A mistake has been made by me, and no amount of ignorance at my end can makes it right.
I’m going to do the next best thing – to remedy the mistake I’ve made.
I need your advise on this matter with regards to copyrights.
If I want to highlight wordpress themes at my website, and yet still want to ensure that I DO NOT violate any copyright, can I do this?
- everything remains status quo (the screenshot and the post itself)
- the download link to directly link to the author’s file instead? (would this be allowed or considered stealing bandwidth?)
Thanks and appreciate if you could clarify. Once this is sorted out, I’ll edit back all my previous post to remedy the situation.
Once again, please accept my humble apologies for my mistakes.
- melvin
By the way Sadish, the terms of use for the said template is this:
http://wpthemepark.com/license-info/
“All our themes are provided under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License.
It means, you can use the themes for Commercial / Non-Commercial purposes, as long as you keep the links to this website intact.”
And I DID keep the links to wpthemepark.com intact. I wasn’t taking away the credit of your work, as such, did not infringe the copyright in that sense. My mistake was making it available for download directly from my site, which was not made known that it’s not allowed. But of course if it’s against your terms, do let me know.
I think it will also help future users if you do include this portion into your license at the wpthemepark site:
“We do not want these themes / plugins to be hosted anywhere else for people to be able to download.”
Thanks and looking forward to your reply on my previous comment.
- melvin
Thanks Melvin,
Thank you for
1. Making the theme downloadable only from our website.
2. Responding back to me on your site’s comments.
3. Responding back to me on the post here.
I have update my license page, here and in wpthemepark.com to clearly mention “We do not want these themes / plugins to be hosted anywhere else for people to be able to download.”.
Previously I had Creative Commons Share Alike License at the time you made those changes.
so what you did [adding a footer link and re-release] is legal.
but if a theme author keeps requesting you to remove the themes, you should at least respond to him, right.?
because I saw your site being updated with new posts, but not a reply for my comment. That is when I got so irritated and I thought you are avoiding to reply to my comments.
Now I know that you have outsourced this to another person, but not before.
You can run your website to showcase other people’s works,but you should look into the actual theme files and at the theme authors website if they have any licensing information.
It will be better if you send an email to the theme authors asking for permission to share it on your website.
If that is not possible, on each of your post, have a link to contact you directly, saying “if you are the theme owner, and you do not want to list your themes here, contact us”.
and you should promptly reply too ;)
Again Thanks for resolving my concerns.
Sadish
Hi Sadish,
Thanks for your prompt response. I’ve sent you an email to your gmail account. Please let me know if you did not receive it. Thanks.
- melvin
Thanks man, i agree