-Eric

Well that’s crummy. I wonder if guy that answered you is ignorant of how code works, and thinks he bought or otherwise obtained the theme from someone, fair and square. gazellecreative dot com claims that she designed it. Well, she changed the colors of the skin, but it’s still the same. Even the copyright notice has exactly the same characteristics. That was a stupid thing to overlook.

It’s one thing for someone to take code and manipulate it and use it on their site for personal use. It’s quite another to claim you designed it and use it to promote your work.

Ignorance though, is not an excuse when it comes to copyrights.

http://ryanhellyer.net/wp-content/themes/hellishsimplicity/style.css

You could also specify an existing license, like “Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License” or GPL instead in there.

With a GPL license you can’t stop people copying your designs though, so if you don’t want that then you should stick to a more restrictive license.

I see on the weblogtoolscollection.com post that there was some confusion over your licensing too and some people assumed that it would be GPL. I’m guessing the original thief may have thought this too, hence they so blatantly copied your code.

Anyhows, your theme is much better than the copied version, so this whole kerfuffle is likely to have attracted more interest to your site than you would have had anyway and the copier has made themself look like a complete dork in the process. So win, win for you!

Ryan,
All these different types of Licenses are quite confusing to me and when there were some issues with the ripoffs in the past, people suggest to have a license page on the site, such as this one.

Basically you can do whatever you want to the theme as long as you are using it for yourself. If you are making a derivative of it, you should get in touch with me before releasing it to the public.
There are many people who contact me like that and I just ask them to keep the footer link to my site. Thats it.

If you read the comments on the Conservablog site, you could see I contacted them first to let them know and he replied that it is not at all based on my theme. That was very rude and that is why I started writing this post.

I am thankful to everyone who has been supporting my work so far and fighting for me. Your positive comments and appreciations far exceed the irritations these ripoffs give me.
Thank you.

Fortunately yours is infinitely superior. I do have to wonder why they claimed it wasn’t copied from yours though. A quick flick through the source was a dead giveaway.

BTW, are your themes copyrighted? I couldn’t see any copyright notice in your theme. Perhaps they assumed it was GPL’d?

I assumed a theme I downloaded from you a while back was GPL’d, I’ll go take a look now to check if it is or not. I made quite a few modifications to it, so don’t want to be breaching copyright (I’m only using it on my own site, it’s not available for download).

Don`t worry about that. It`s a bad and poor copy. Your theme is superior in design and elegance.

Best

Sadish

I agree that it is based on your html and CSS. The CSS files are too similar with elements like voice family that I have never seen in another css file before.