Stealing from the poor?

There is one thing I absolutely love about the internet…  When I am designing something, there is always a plentiful array of free stock images, themes, and the like out there for the taking.  It used to be, if you needed something, you grabbed a paper and pencil, a camera, or a stone and chisel (depending on how old you are).  Now, you go to Google, type in what you need, and typically you can find half a dozen+ resources to help you out.

Now, most of the time, these resources you find may be free.  However, free does not mean “Steal this thing I made, and claim it as your own!”  A lot of the work out there, even though people are letting you use it, they still spent time making it.

That is what the CC, or Creative Commons was created for.  In essence, the CC is here to say that someone can use your work, adapt it to your needs, but ensure that the creator still gets his hat tip.  There are some variations of it, but the down and dirty is that you can use it however you want, just give props to the person who put in the work.

But there are always the people out there who ignore all of that “common sense”, and figure if there isn’t a big watermark on it, that they can do whatever the hell they want to do with it, and can claim they did it all on their own…

Sure, there are exceptions out there.  I have found stuff that has been floating around for so long, that finding the true original author would be neigh impossible to do.  Some people say right off the bat that they don’t want/need and recognition.  But does that mean that it is still okay to claim that you created it?  No.  Not in the least.  At the very least, if you don’t know who made it, just don’t say anything.  That way, if someone recognizes it as their work or someone’s that they know, you don’t look like a douche and ruin your reputation.

The internet is like an elephant, it never forgets, and if it turns its back on you, there is a good chance it is going to take a shit on you.

I have been victim of this on not one, but many many occasions.  I have posted several Wordpress themes, plugins, clipart, images, etc for free under the CC license over the past decade.  Sadly, only about 50% of the people who the stuff ever retained the copyright notice or gave credit where credit was due.  My Isolated theme I made a few years back was used a few hundred times withing 6 months of its initial release.  That is just the numbers I got from linkbacks when they published it and my link in the footer was picked up.  That isn’t counting those who removed the copyright before even activating it.  Of those linkbacks, fewer than 2 dozen still had my link anywhere on the theme when I checked them when I saw the links on my dashboard.  I even got email asking for help, and when I went to visit their site to help them out, my link/copyrights where no where to be found.

I know that this is all part of the “providing free content” scene out there.  If you provide something for free, there are going to be people out there who think that means that it instantly becomes 100% theirs to do with what they want and claim full credit.

There is a flip side to that as well.  If you piss off the people that provide the free content, they aren’t going to provide support, upgrades, more content in the future, and may remove the free stuff they had already posted.  They become jaded.

That is where I stand now.  I design for money.  Sure, the themes were free…  Maybe they weren’t SUPER DUPER awesome.  But they showcased what I could do.  I made them to quench the thirst of what some people were saying they wanted in a theme.  So I spent several hours of my time to make them, then give them out.  I am not one of those sites thats whole purpose is to pump out theme after theme.  The URL requirement I put on the themes was there for 2 reasons, and 2 reasons, in my opinion, that most theme authors require this:

1. To get credit for the time put into it.
2. To get their name out there.

A free theme can act like a business card.  It is something free you give out to as many people as you can, and statistically, a potential client will eventually contact you for some work.  But if you hand out business cards that someone removed your name and contact info from, or ones someone put their own contact info on, it doesn’t quite get the job done.

This is all why, for the time being, I will not provide any more of my themes for free and have removed all my old ones from the site.  There are still places out there that have them available for download, but I will not provide them. Nor will I provide support for them anymore.  All emails and comments I get concerning them I typically delete. (I will make them available for download, but NO SUPPORT, click here…)

Will this change in the future?  Perhaps.  For now, I am going to only focus on creating for actual clients.  If I am going to make something that isn’t for a friend that will not bear my link/contact info, I want to get paid for it at the very least.

I would suggest taking this to heart when searching for anything you need.  While you may not be here for one of my themes, there will come a time when you find free content someone is providing out there on the big internet one day.  Respect the copyrights they put on it.  Otherwise, all these great resources where you get free stuff will eventually dwindle (I know, that will take hell of a long time).  Then people will be forced to Photoshop out watermarks, dig through code, torrent, etc.  Hell, maybe even forced to do it the old fashioned way and make it themselves! ;)

And we all know, one of the best things about the internet is getting what you need with little to no effort.