Massive violation of licenses in Codecanyon

Hi, we would like to know how is possible that there are people that on public pages of Facebook are advertising that they could give for free any Themeforest and Codecanyon products? As soon as our product was post in an article on Envato Tuts immediately (from the day after) we started to sell less of the 40%. We discovered that after that article more than 30 websites are giving for free or selling our product. We found also someone that is writing on public group page that who wants Themeforest Theme or Codecanyon Plugin can write him in inbox. This is absloutely terrible, there is no law that defense us against this kind of violations? So we are working for months to enrich other people? There is a way to protect own product?

Please don’t write me DCMA because honestly I think is useless

That is the law that defends you from this kind of violation. Well, it’s one of the options available to you under copyright law. Another is to initiate legal action against them, which is usually a bit more costly and long winded than a DMCA.

It happens to a lot of authors unfortunately, one of my scripts has 40-ish sales but I have found over 300 websites using the script.

It’s just something we have to live with being authors on envato.

This is so bad :frowning:

Charging for updates is one way to fight piracy. Because after several updates, product becomes outdated or at least not desirable as the latest version.

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You wouldn’t be allowed to do this under envato’s license

I meant Envato not me obviously.

But then your item also becomes less desirable to potential buyers at the time of purchase. Might put people off buying if there are recurring fees.

So I think it would cause a drop in sales. Maybe not a massive one, but it’s not like it would inspire the people who are downloading from dodgy sites to buy the item legitimately… they’ll just find some other free item elsewhere.

So the likely outcome would just be more of a moral victory than anything… the satisfaction of knowing that people aren’t getting your work for free. But it wouldn’t make you any more money… and might actually lose you money.

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Plus this would mean envato fundamentally adjusting how their marketplaces work and removing a benefit to shopping here.

That’s before buyers who are accustomed to how things work and who don’t realise it changed finding out later and the subsequent disappointment, confusion and barrage of refund requests

Dont forget this helps fighting license abuse as well, since many buy just single license and then keep reusing it like it was extended.

Please tell me you’ve not got all the way to Level 8 believing that an extended license means you can use an item multiple times!

You know what I mean. There is a lot of license abuse at cc and tf.

That’s why i think all products should have some code attached for product control.
Purchase code is awesome, but it doesn’t mean that the buyer can’t re-use the product for several other times, what makes author to lose money also.
This product control could be some tool from envato, that could register the place to be used the product, and where the API could have access, or maybe give granted control to authors to verify where the product was being used.
Well, just my tip.

Best regards.

Just allow authors drop database if no purchase code is provided in 30 days

I don’t think that would be a good solution.

Backdoors like that should never be added to products.

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But we (authors) need to protect ourselves too :thinking:

What can we as a author do when we detect that a user violated license terms & conditions?

  1. Can we delete the database?
  2. Can we also delete the codebase?
  3. Can we terminate the license?
  4. What more legal steps can envato help us with?

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