on June 4th, 2007It really frustrates me so much !
Latest Update : Jun 07 2007. They removed those themes from their site. Thanks to everyone who have supported me.Thank you very much !
Everyday I spend quite a lot of my personal times in building and supporting quality wordpress themes, like MistyLook.
Then someone comes from out of the blue, downloads the theme, edit the footer and add his own links and share the theme for download.
It is definitely against my wishes and it is quite disheartening.
I have been crying in my License Page asking people not to do that, but some people do not want to listen.
They just want to get a lot of back links, by STEALING other people’s work.
No, it is not just my themes. He has taken the works of many of the wordpress theme authors like Andreas Viklund, Brian Gardner etc.
The latest one I found is http://www.hosting-review.com . See http://hosting-review.com/wordpress-themes/free-templates.shtml .
I tried to contact them using their contact page, but that is broken.
The contact page seems to be working now. If you have a minute, please let them know your views. Thanks.
I have no words to express how hurt I am, but I will just say to the owner of hosting-review.com “Consider yourself a thief !“
And they even state that their pages are protected against scraping by copyscape :)
That’s really sad … and kind of disheartening. But you will not lose faith, will you?
I just came by to let you know I chose your ShadedGrey (2?) for my site … very nice indeed. Coincidentally, I came by to thank you and to say I’d be changing a few things, and would let you know about the changes so you could adopt them if you liked.
regards
–bentrem
May I add templatesbrowser.com to the thieves list?
Well those are just few of the sites doing this. I wonder if having a GPL license for Themes is feasible at all cos it takes away your right to fight against such thieves.
Sadish, thanks for bringing this to my attention – there is something blatantly wrong with taking someone’s theme, and then adding their link to it.
THIS PISSES ME OFF!
I have not given them permission to do this, and don’t like them trying to steal a link from something I’ve done.
Arpit,
NO. My themes are not GPL or CC.
My themes adhere to my own License Page.
Small Potato,
Yes there are other thieves in the surroundings too.
Brian Gardner,
Glad to see you feel the same way that I do.
All,
Every time a post like this pops up, people tend to drift away by talking about different theme licenses and their drawbacks.
It is not about the theme license. Its about ethics and morality.
If there is anything we can do about this, let me know.
SP, Brian,
Also take a look at http://technorati.com/search/hosting-review.com and see how many backlinks he has got.
Hi
I browsed through the templates and recognized many of them, with the copyright changed. Shameful. The contact form was working and I expressed my thoughts to the owner. Good luck.
Latest Update : Jun 07 2007.
They remove those themes from their site. Thanks to everyone who have supported me.
Thank you very much !
Sadish