I know there are few things that aggravate me more than being plagiarized on the web. It can be anything from stealing posts on a website to ripping themes to redistributing plugins with minor modifications outside of the licensing terms. It's sad that people feel they have to take away from someone who has worked for what they have accomplished, but it's out there and there is often not a whole lot that can be done if a DMCA request isn't honored. (I submit DMCA notices when I catch it, but it's hard to get someone to do something about it half the time.
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Anyone else had to deal with this sort of thing in the past? How do you generally respond to your work being plagiarized?
Generally I respond by posting my thanks for the compliments in these ripping threads (Then with DMCA of course).
The way I always look at it is the people that rip and download ripped themes likely had no intention of buying it in the first place. That doesn't make it right though, of course.
I think this is why so many people are hesitant to share their website with people who use the same software, because somebody might rip off their site idea, actually that was my fear. Sigh. Great post.
It is frustrating indeed. I have a forum that barely has any traffic that got ripped recently, and the DMCA takedown request wasn't honored, unfortunately. A freeloader merely requested it and the website's administrator put it up (and sells it, by the way). Pretty frustrating that somebody is literally profiting off my design without even giving me a single word of credit for the design.
I almost wonder if it's best just to release these designs for free at this point, but I don't want to do that because I feel there is really nothing wrong with having a unique website design these days. The whole reason I design my own themes for everything is so that my forum won't look exactly like 2,000 forums haha. plus my themes aren't good enough to be particularly proud of anyway.