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Originally Posted by PiZero
Hi to all, friends, This is a “special post”. No theme publishing today. Instead, I’d like to share with you some thoughts about something that is really putting me down.
First, I’d like to explain the first part of the title. Honesty exists, yes.
Before running this blog I was unsure about real honesty, for people you don’t know (not the kind of thing like “i buy, and I don’t steal. Because i’m honest”, but real honesty, like “I can get this free, but I prefer to buy, to thank the author).
I’ve had, during the last year, great experiences with real honest people. Like all the people that sent me donations for the free themes. First of all, thank you to all the donators, and to all the people that purchased my Premium Themes. Then a special example come from a guy named Stefano, he sent me donations during all the year. And he also bought all the premium themes, including older and newer ones. A big thanks also to Mr JackH., for his sincere appreciations and suggestion about my themes. I sent him for free some premium themes, but he decided however to buy them. A big thanks also for the guys that reported me violations on copyright, and forums hosting illegally my premium themes.
But unfortunately, not all the people act like this.
The problem is that I discovered, some days ago, that somebody is selling some of my FREE THEMES, the ones you get weekly free from here, on HANDANGO, for 10$ each.
Handango(.)com is the biggest marketplace for mobile software in the world. It is controlled by the Microsoft Corporation, but it is also very criticized, because the standards of the service are not very high, the site is slow, and the software is not controlled, and very expensive.
I also sell my Premium Themes on Handango, because they can provide me some little money that is needed.
(But, you know, when I put a theme on Handango, at 10$, they charge the user 14,99 $ (10$ for the theme, plus 4,99 for “download protection service” (???)). After that, they retain 55% of the retail price. So, I sell the theme at 10$. Handango takes 10,50$, I get 4,50$ (Equal= 3 Euro). And they pay me only if I reach 250$ of royalty, which is very difficult. Otherwise, they retain the whole income).
But that’s not the point. The point is that somebody is downloading my free themes from here, he rename them, and then he sells my themes on Handango for 10$.
Of course this is a violation of my license terms, but also a violation of US, International and Italian civil and criminal law. (intellectal property violated for commercial purposes).
Of course this thing made my furious.
I immediately alerted Handango, to remove the fraudolent themes for sale, and to have the NAME of that person.
I received a quick reply from Handango after some hours. The guy told me that my email was turned to the copyright manager, to quickly solve the issue.
After 48 hours, I sent another email. They told methat the copyright manager is “currently out of office”, but she will “surely reply as soon as she can”.
Another day has passed. Today, I receive an email from Handango telling that “72 Hours have passed since your last email. Since we did not hear about you, We changed the incident state to SOLVED“.
I got to handango page, and the themes are still available for purchase.
I really hope to see that problem solved rapidly, but however I will have to wait until next week.
The only thing that I can tell now, is that If will get the name of that person, I will seriously consider a legal action against him. I don’t like the idea that he is making money on my work, but the worst thing, that is really making me furious, is that is really SCAMMING people by selling freeware, and I would be very pleased to give him a some worries.
If only this person is found to be Italian, he should be warned, because he is risking the prison.
But even if I will manage to solve this problem, this stuff really makes me unsure about the future of thememaking. I’m really losing the happiness and the enjoyment of making themes. Now I just make themes, and then I must spend my time checking that my themes are not been sold somewhere, or published without my name etc.
Long time ago, I found people selling my free themes and Babi’s Themes on Ebay.
Another time, I found that an Handango customer, after buying my Premium Themes, was publishing them on a forum. Just today, I got an email from a user, telling that somebody was uploading my free themes on a rapidshare-like service, and got payed 15$ for every 1000 download.
I also found, some months ago, a russian site that modified and renamed every sis file, to delete the author’s name and to put a popup with the website address instead.
And another time, I found a chinese website where there was a thememaker making “clones” of my premium themes. Chinese fake premium themes! (this was instead very funny…)
I really don’t understand why people act like this. Making something that is free is great because you have much feedback about users, many traffic, many comments and many downloads. But unfortunately there is also some people that only want to destroy or use your work for their personal purposes. So don’t blame me, if in a remote future (and I hope NEVER!), I will give up making themes, or if my themes will be no longer free.
That’s all folks, thanks for reading this very long post.
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