Business ethics?
I just noticed that the design competition I mentioned in my last post is sponsored by a website that sells open source templates as "unique designs" for hundreds of U.S. dollars. In other words, someone can pay a lot of money for what he thinks is a "unique design" - but what he really gets is a slightly modified open source template which may already be used on thousands of websites. For example, andreas07 is sold as "unique" for $445, while andreas01 is sold for $325. If you don't want to pay for these "unique" templates, you can register for a $59.95 membership and download as many templates as you want to during one year.
While it is indeed perfectly OK (meaning "not nice, but also not illegal") to delete the credits and re-distribute templates on the commercial market, it is really ugly to fool people into paying hundreds of dollars to get something that they could just as well get for free. And calling the designs "unique" is nothing but a lie, and this completely crushes all respect I have for this website. They also don't answer my e-mails, so I assume that they don't mind that I write about their lack of business ethics.
But they are obviously sponsoring the open source community through OWD, so I've asked for more information in order to understand what this is all about. Once I know more I'll decide what to do next.
Until then, I recommend everyone who want "premium templates" to not click the banner on OWD. Download the free templates instead! If you still need "premium templates" (which I rather referr to as "commercial templates" since the price is the main difference), then check out the templates from 4Templates. Those are manually coded by professional designers, and sold by a serious company with good business ethics.
Edit: This is completely insane! Look at these rules, taken from the license information on the mentioned website:
- "You may not sell/giveaway our templates to 3rd parties."
- "You may not claim that you designed our templates."
- "You may not include/bundle our templates within your products and sell them."
- "You may not distribute our template after you have performed modifications on it, UNLESS all images and design objects are replaced and the template looks drastically different from the original template. The images we use are licensed and if you use them without obtaining a proper license you will be liable for damages and copyright infringement."
And on the same page, the following warning is posted:
"IMPORTANT WARNING - All our template(s) and digital work(s) have been filed with the US, UK and Australian Copyright Office. If you misuse or distribute our digital works without prior written consent from us, we will seek damages and you will be prosecuted."
This is just… Insane…
Edit 2: Leaving the topic for now to let other people do their thing. I've been forced to explain myself over and over again, since many have missed what the main problem really is. But a lot of people have learned the truth about these "unique" templates, and that is good. Now I just hope that the website owners go through their templates and make sure that they don't keep the false marketing and the direct lies on their site. That is the only reasonable thing to do if they want to show some kind of good spirit. But I won't waste any energy on this for now, I still have a lot of work to catch up with…
Comments can be only posted for 14 days after the post date. If you have comments about an older post such as this one, feel free to send me an e-mail!
Comment from Andreas
Time: September 13, 2006, 4:16
Yes, I should make that clear. There are templates by many different open source template designers on that site, not only mine.
Pat, feel free to send me the URLs of the templates you have found! In case you have released any of the templates with an CC Attribution license, please let me know about that too. I will write more about this if I don't get a perfect explaination very soon, and I would appreciate if I had more material to show as examples.
If this template store is violating someones license, the designer(s) should of course seek damages and have the template store prosecuted. =)
Comment from Carl Galloway
Time: September 13, 2006, 8:14
Can I point out that there is no such thing as an Australian Copyright Office, copyright in Australia is deemed to take effect from the moment the works are created and does not require registration to be eforceable. Patents and trademarks can be registered but this is a very different thing.
Andreas, your designs have been very successfully marketed and unless these people can prove that you ripped off their design there is no way they can claim copyright of your design.
Please forgive the following comment, and feel free to edit this but rip their f#cking heads off. The b@stard who is trying to claim your designs deserves to have their site blacklisted by everybody. And very bad form for OWD to accept sponsorship from these people.
Comment from zoneX
Time: September 13, 2006, 9:08
they are with you and the thought of Carl sopporto these things and I do not know what to say but the web now……. that sadness… hello Andreas
:)
Comment from LobsterMan
Time: September 13, 2006, 11:05
Poor fools are going to pay for them…
I think OWD should dump them, as they are a place to support developers, not crooks.
And I'm pretty sure they're some license violations there, let all designers get together and sue their ass, get publicity to open source designs, and scare off anyone thinking of doing the same thing.
Comment from Andreas
Time: September 13, 2006, 11:37
The problem is not really what this site is doing to the designers. I can live with that. It is what they do to their members and customers…
I don't really mind that people make money from my work, as long as it is done in an honest way. This is not honest at all. And since I have informed the site about this situation and nothing has happened after that (I sent several friendly e-mails in case some of their designers had lied about these templates and fooled the site owner into believing that they were truly unique), I have to assume that they knew the background already and that they will continue working in this way.
Comment from Vlad I.
Time: September 13, 2006, 12:27
What can I say… I'm from a country where the intelectual property isn't respected at all. The most designers download a free template and change it (the changes could be major or minor) but a few of them say to the costumers before they sign a contract that the design is a free version and the money that they pay isn't for the design is for the services (that includes modifying the template).
Is this good or bad?
Comment from Ainslie
Time: September 13, 2006, 12:40
It just doesnt seem honest at all. Offering templates for a membership fee that they could have got free from OWD and then offering the chance to purchase the template as unique!
The trouble is have we got the resources to fight this sort of thing? Sadly, often we have not.
My worry is that OWD gets put in the spotlight as the "bad guy" when they probably did not realise this was happening.
Comment from CoolGoose
Time: September 13, 2006, 13:21
Imho Andreas you should realease your templates under CC or something like that.
Comment from Andreas
Time: September 13, 2006, 13:36
Vlad: If the changes are significant, of course it is OK. That is the way many companies work, and there is nothing wrong with paying for the service rather than for the design. But that is not what happens in this case.
On this website, many of the templates are only lightly modified from their free open sourced originals. What the client is asked to pay for is the right to get a "unique" design, meaning that once the design is purchased for hundreds of dollars it is not sold or possible to download for anyone else. But these "unique" designs are almost exactly the same templates that are used on thousands on other websites already - so this website tricks its members to pay for something that is not unique - but instead actually completely free on other websites.
Imagine that you pay $400 for what they claim is a unique design template, just to find out that 25.000+ websites look exactly the same as yours - and that all those sites got their design for free. That is what happens here, and that is definitely not OK.
So what kind of differences are there between the templates and the originals? In the three templates I have looked at, andreas07 had got the link and header colors changed from red to green. On andreas01, the light gray fields have been made a bit darker and the main h1 header font is a little bit bigger. The sample images had also been changed (see the screenshot above). And finally, andreas04 was mirrored so that the sidebar and the main menu appears to the left rather than to the right.
Those changes take 5-10 minutes each to apply, and I do not think that those changes make the templates "unique" and adds hundreds of dollars of value.
Ainslie: No, OWD is in no way any "bad guy" here. I don't think Aaron had any idea about this, but I'm still waiting for an e-mail from him so I don't really know. In any case, I have prepared a sponsorship replacement solution for OWD that will secure the competition prize money and also bring in money for future contests - without promoting a website which lies to its members.
But I really want to speak with Aaron before I do anything else.
Comment from isecore
Time: September 13, 2006, 15:05
goddamn rippers. I hate it when companies take something that someone else gives away for free, re-labels it and sells it. It's the same in the FOSS/Open-Source software community. Every now and then some thief or liar steals the code from a FOSS-project and claims it's their own invention and sells it for a shitload of money.
One of the more obvious examples of this is when Miranda IM got their stuff stolen, rebadged and marketed as ZeeZ IM.
The companies and people who do this have no morals. They're pathetic. It's sad that they manage to trick customers into believing their lies.
Comment from christopher
Time: September 13, 2006, 15:08
oh.. my.. god..
that is pathetic, and this one.
http://www.dreamtemplate.com/index.php?action=detail&catID=46&productID=748
compare with:
http://openwebdesign.org/viewdesign.phtml?id=2622&referer=%2Fuserinfo.phtml%3Fuser%3Dtristar
that is easily the one that TriStar Web Design created, the one that he based off of one yours Andreas, with the static sidebar.. this is outrageous!
Comment from christopher
Time: September 13, 2006, 15:09
oh my, look what i just found:
http://www.dreamtemplate.com/index.php?action=detail&catID=48&productID=772
this really is your Andreas, they even kept the images in the same place, just changed what the images are of.
Comment from christopher
Time: September 13, 2006, 15:13
sory for the third post, but this is awful:
http://www.dreamtemplate.com/index.php?action=detail&catID=48&productID=875
http://www.dreamtemplate.com/index.php?action=detail&catID=47&productID=874
yet more designs ripped and sold, something WILL be done about this site.
Comment from seanrox
Time: September 13, 2006, 17:31
Andreas and others. MonkeyMan over at http://www.OpenWebDesign.org just posted a reply about this subject, so go take a look.
I think if everyone started emailing this company, especially the designers, they wold have to reply. Power in numbers and with the great design community most of us belong to, now is a good time for us to all pull together and do something about it.
Comment from Neil
Time: September 13, 2006, 18:15
Yikes. That's pretty bad. While they aren't repackaging the CC ones, even if you repackage and resell something released into the public domain, I think you're obligated to at least tell that to your customers (and possibly the original author of the work as a courtesy). Maybe not legally obligated, but at least morally.
(though one could argue morality is entirely relative, much like copyright law, but that's another can of flesh-eating worms)
Comment from Craig
Time: September 13, 2006, 22:29
I really can't understand why these people would do that. I'm all for tinkering with sites to see what makes them tick, but to resell them, and at that price too… Thats just plain rude.
You create some really nice designs Andreas and I can't understand why think that they can get away with them, your site is that popular we know your work a mile off.
In my opinion they should make it illegal to rip sites of so much when they have been created for the good of people who are less creative.
See you around on OWD, hopefully i'll have a go at the contest ;)
Comment from Ethan Neuen
Time: September 14, 2006, 0:46
This is outrageous
**And that about sums it all up.
Comment from Andreas
Time: September 14, 2006, 0:55
Yes, and now that I know more about Aaron's view on it all and the actions he will take, I'm leaving this topic for now. I will return to it later, but not in relation with OWD and the upcoming contest. I'm letting people who know more than I do investigate a few details about this website, and they will take over the details from now. And with that, I'm closing the discussion here. Time to move on…
Comment from pat
Time: September 13, 2006, 3:53
After reading I decided to check it out and found a few of my templates up there too. Business ethics indeed…