Would you provide supportive services to someone for free so that person could make a living doing what they do? Say, if someone ran a clothing store, would you sew all the garments and set them on the curb with a free sign so that shop owner could take your work and sell it without paying you a penny for it? What about a deli? Would you bake bread to give away for free so they could use it to sell sandwiches to make money?

I’m sure the answer would be no to both cases. Then why is it that some people who run WordPress sites seem to think that they can take themes which have very specific copyright restrictions on them, change those themes as they please, remove all credit to the original author (who put their personal time and effort into the work), and then present it as their own on a commercial blog?

I don’t know why either, but that’s exactly what I found twice this week regarding my Bogart theme, which has a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License attached to it. The first was a site that made some alterations to Bogart by adding a few new class selectors, images, and changing the ordering of columns in the index template. All credit to me was removed from the theme template (except in the CSS file where no one would see it). The second didn’t change a thing, aside from removing my copyright in the footer.php file, and replacing it with their own.

In both cases, the sites are set up as commercial blogs using Google AdSense ads to generate income. In other words, they’re using my free bread to create sandwiches that are making them money. This isn’t right. When something’s not right, I fight.

I’m pleased to say that in the case of the first site, I was able to get the matter resolved the day I contacted them. As it was told, the original owner of the site changed my theme before selling the entire blog to another company. In this case, the new owner did the right thing, and we were able to agree on a fair license agreement to use my work. Even though he didn’t change my work himself, the new owner was still using my core code base, and recognized this fact. I have tremendous respect for this individual for doing the right thing without hesitation.

The second, which I just learned of this evening, has been notified of their infringement. I am still waiting to hear from someone. There was no way to contact anyone directly and emails sent to very generic accounts for the site have bounced back. The site appears to be a link-bait type of set up with tons of keywords and links to other spammy blogs. I may have to pull a DMCA take down on them if they don’t respond.

Update: The second site has responded, and have added my theme credit link back to the footer file.

The point of all this is simple. If you want a cool looking WordPress theme for your site, especially if you’re hoping to make money from it — think before you start making changes to someone else’s work. Ask yourself “Did someone else put their own time in effort into this nice looking theme? And would they be pissed off if I removed their credit before I put it up on my site?” Your id would tell you yes in both cases.

Simply because something is available for download on the internet, that doesn’t mean it’s free. Just like music, poetry and art, code is owned by the person who created it (or whoever they wrote it for). So do the right thing. If that WordPress theme has a credit link in the footer, and you want to use it for free — then leave the link right where it is. By putting that little link where we do, we theme authors are simply asking to be paid for our work in recognition via clicks back to our sites. And if you don’t want the link, then contact the author to work something out. Even if it’s just a little scratch in their Paypal account, getting a few bucks for their labor of love will make the day for most theme authors.

The moral of my rant? That WordPress theme was made public for a reason — because somebody with talent wanted to share it with you and the rest of the world. If it has some restrictions and a copyright notice attached, then honor it… Because that’s the right thing to do — both morally and legally.