I have a friend who is a Power Elite author selling his awesome WP themes at ThemeForest. One of his well-known theme’ buyers registered a domain representing the theme and selling it illegally on his own website!
He (my friend) tried to send a DMCA to the website hosting provider, and the provider disabled his website, but finally he (the buyer) launched his website again but with a different hosting provider which didn’t respect the DMCA and Copyright laws.
We tried to contact Paypal regarding this situation, as the buyer use their service to receive funds for the illegal sales transactions! But unfortunately, Paypal didn’t help us, and they asked my friend to register his theme’ brand, and company before taking any action!
My friend also tried to contact Envato Support, but they informed him that he’s the copyright holder, and there’s nothing to do/help! Really? What if he’s not a Power Elite Author?
Why Envato can’t help in this situation? This author (my friend) selling his themes exclusively on Envato Market, and those illegal sales affects his & also Envato profit. Envato is a registered company, and I believe if they will contact Paypal regarding this case (as Envato have this theme exclusively on their own market), maybe Paypal will respond in this case!
Lastly, I don’t want to waste your valuable time, but if someone have an advice regarding this issue, I’ll be glad if you can help.
Generally it’s best to spend time improving items than chasing copyright.
Update the item graphics to include a version number or “new feature” banner. People searching for the item will find Envato first and see the legit copy comes with more.
Track down the buyer and notify Envato. Get their IP address even. Envato might be able to find the buyer based on that and disable their account. Or buy it from them and ask for a license code to access support, get the code, send it to Envato and have it disabled.
Another option is to add a license code check into the theme. Restrict usage based on that.
Funny story someone was reselling Envato products cheap. Buy it once, hope to sell it multiple times. They had directory index on hosting, could see what items they bought. Someone just bought all their own items through the pirate, then got their hosting shut down. So this guy made a profit off the pirate. Lol
Here’s the official response from Envato.
Maybe it will help you.
Hi,
Thanks for letting us know about this potential copyright violation. We have taken note of your report and will investigate it. Unfortunately, sometimes this can be a lengthy process as we have many reports to follow up on and a lot of sites either take a long time to respond to us, or don’t respond at all.
You might find that it’s much quicker and effective when you take action yourself. You probably know that you maintain all your copyright to your files even though these are being sold on our marketplaces. As the copyright owner you can take action as soon as you see any of your files being distributed without your permission.
We have created some resources that can help you with the steps you can take. Please find these via the following links:
We take copyright infringement very seriously at Envato and we look into all the matters that are reported to us.
Thanks for taking the time to get in touch with us.
Kind Regards,
Thinesh P
Now from my experience. I totally agree with what he says @dtbaker .
I first time I blocked the site on Google. From the hosting company can find out who it is. If a service uses DNS masking (CDN) is difficult. CloudFlare for example will give you all the information about it.
If you know who he is. After all this begins a game of cat and mouse. You need a sentence of a legal court for delete domain . But this will require money and time. Usually it only takes a threat. No need to sue him. But you gotta find out who.
Legal recourse here is unfortunately very costly and limited in effectiveness.
A more technical solution might be to use DMCA to remove the webpages from Google’s search index. That can reduce the website’s traffic by as much as 86% reducing the damage the infringing site can do to your friend’s sales.
Thanks in advance.