Designers: What do you do when you find a forum that removed your copyright?

[flick]

I think theme designers deserve to have their credits left on a theme (so long as it's not intrusive or glaringly obvious in large font) as they've worked hard on it.

However, there is a post I've found wonderfully helpful for matters about copyright/credits removal under a GPL license that hopefully might make interesting reading for some. It's a blog post called Price of Freedom by Photo Matt aka. Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress, which many will know of and use, which can be found here: http://photomatt.net/2007/07/16/price-of-freedom/

I would encourage everyone to read the post in full, but the key points that really strike me are:

If you accept that bad people are going to be bad then the real question becomes how do you maximize the effect of the good instead of treating them just like the bad. (No one likes to be treated like a criminal.)

In my brief experience here’s three things that work:

1. Give people the tools they need to succeed. This can be interpreted on a lot of levels, but personally I’ve found at the most base the freedoms provided by the GPL and other open source licenses are incredibly empowering.
2. Celebrate the successes. Talk, connect, promote, and embrace the people who are creating things on top of your creation. (The best revenge against someone doing something bad is helping create something awesome.)
3. Provide a way for people to choose to help you, and try to remove as much friction from that process as possible. Now that you’ve ignored the bad people and delighted the good, by their very nature they’ll want to give something back.