Can any one start a service to save and stop Author's work from being used illegally

Just like we have an awesome service like Ticksy where supporting is made easy for authors. Can someone from our community also start a service to stop illegal usage of our products? I will be happy to pay upto $30-50 for such service per month. I know this cannot be stopped completely. But, it can be reduced to a greater extent.

I was on checking out freelancing website Fiverr yesterday. And, there one person posted the following request below:

This is AIT themes directory theme I believe which he is asking for $5. :worried:

Basic Idea:

This service should stalk all the popular freelancing websites and keep an eye on such activities and It should work like a notification service. Authors are busy creating products and they don’t have a copyright team to save their work from being used illegally. So, this service will be useful for authors where they should get notified whenever their products are being misused on any other platforms. So, the service will send author a notification, that your item “Item name” is being misused by this person on example.com and we authors can hit this person with a DMCA.

Thoughts?

Hi There ,

have you looked at this : http://themeforest.net/forums/thread/freshkiller-lets-group-together-and-give-them-hell-/26349 ? :smile:

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Hollywood have been trying to do this forever with exhaustive budgets, I’m sorry but $30 is really going to get anyone anywhere with this, best thing is just to move on and accept these users were never going to pay anyway.

$30 isn’t, but I’m assuming the idea was that even if only 10,000 authors sign up, then that would be $360K a year. Probably enough for a small team of decent developers to come up with a solution that would track down an item. Removing the items is a different matter, but if the author gets a list of their items and their locations every week then they can get on the case with some run-dmca action.

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I agree with @tommusrhodus, this is waste of time and money. Most of those people won’t purchase it anyway and if they would, they will be one of those bad customers for sure. I actually believe that some of those guys will maybe purchase the original version in the future if they realise that there are updates, support and stuff like that.

Sorry, i mean $30-50 per product/theme/plugin. Depends on the creator of the service, how they want to price it. But, that’s what I thought.

I know that. But, the topic is about getting notified through a service. We as authors dont have time to keep checking these popular freelancing websites. So, through the help of such service, we can get notified and then we can file a DMCA.

Unfortunately it won’t make any difference. Besides how do you track it?

  • By name? That’s easy and loads of tools already do that but the people acting illegally would have to use the original file name for it to work.

  • You cannot add tracking codes to the themes themselves. Granted you could put them in your demos I supposed but many of the files (esp. WP themes) that are illegally distributed/sourced will have come from a downloaded version or know what to look for to remove these.

Either way will still continue to happen and more upsetting than anything in these scenarios is even when the author/envato or otherwise send half these websites DCMAs - it still makes no difference and they just don’t care.

Nothing about tracking codes here.

This will be just a notification service. Just, like how I visited the site Fiverr and saw a person asking for theme for $5. I found that is AIT themes product which is being used illegally.

Then, I will take screenshot, take his profile link and report it to the original author.

Then, author will file the DMCA.

There are literally thousands of sites sharing or illegally trying to source envato files so how are the notifications activated?

Is it based on users noticing these sites and uploading them or telling the author that it is happening?

That seems a bit futile and unlikely that people have time to this on a scale that warrants authors paying for it esp. With the limited potential to do anything about it.

Am I missing something?

No, but here we don’t want to focus thousand sites. Here, we will focus only reputed freelancing sites like Fiverr, Freelancer, Upwork, PPH, Guru etc where such things are still happening. These are reputed companies and I am sure they will take right action if their site user is breaking any copyright laws.

Yes, the creators of the service will be monitoring these sites and reporting authors using their service about these illegal activities.

Thoughts?

fiverr is a reputed company? lol. fiverr is build for illegal stuff.

I think users are doing illegal stuff, I have been a Fiverr seller for past 2 years. I had a great experience with them. But, if they are reported with proofs, the company will take an appropriate action.

Every marketplace have users with illegal stuff, whatever. There are everywhere! :no_mouth:

Appropriate action would be to remove the user’s account after twenty gigs got (repeatedly) removed for proven copyright reasons.

But I have never seen fiverr remove any account even if all their gigs were removed by sending a dmca. They actually encourage the users to keep up with creating new gigs, and they make sure their user’s identity are safe so that they can keep on doing this.

A serious company would close accounts the latest after the second proven copyright violation.

Fiverr is made for stealing. Period.