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How Far Would You Go to Protect Your Theme?

27 Feb

Posted by J. Angelo Racoma in Designers, Security

While most theme authors would release their creations for free, there are also WordPress themes that are considered premium. It’s something that’s not exactly custom-made for a design client, but something with added value that authors think would be worth paying for.

Here on Free WordPress Themes, we’ve received a few requests for removal of posted themes, which were in fact premium themes that were bought (or perhaps downloaded elsewhere) and then reposted as a free download. Of course, it’s obvious that the theme author is being deprived of prospective income here, since his work is basically being pirated.

So there’s a difference from authors who report their free themes being uploaded with improper citation. In the case of premium themes, there is actual loss of revenue.

Problem with themes is that once someone purchases a copy or a license, he/she actually gets hold of your source code. So it’s not very easy to secure a theme. You’re at the mercy of the people who buy and download your designs. Sometimes there are resourceful people who can copy themes by directly downloading the .CSS file, images, and then reconstituting the structure from the source of a sample page.

There are ways to minimize this, of course, or to at least detect illegal uploading of your theme, and some suggestions from our end would include encrypting your theme files or even being selective with whom you sell your themes to. Any ideas?

2 Responses

Sophia Lucero
28|Feb|2008 1

Until their creation becomes more specialized, it will still remain easy to steal themes. Then again, I think that’s wishful thinking if you believe in the saying if it’s online, it can and will be stolen. And you’re right, it becomes a question of how far you’re willing to go to prevent that, because at the worst case scenario, you’re up against the most skilled hackers in the world, and that would take a lot more knowledge than HTML/CSS/PHP coding. :)
Chris Osborne
04|Mar|2008 2

When you get the source there’s not much an author can do to stop it. However, if there is one specific place in mind where you want to get someone back there’s always the revenge people have used for hotlinking.

Just have a line buried in the code somewhere that shows an image. Make that image essentially invisible, then change it to porn when your wrath says to.

This would probably only work if you made a theme just for yourself though and didn’t share. If you put it in all copies then you would have to tell people to erase it and those instructions would leak. And you probably wouldn’t want to do this to legit paying customers at all.