There are many websites out there selling HTML templates to use for your own website. I’ve bought many web templates in the past, but it just dawned on me;
Most of them offer full previews of the websites they are selling - essentially offering the product for free, since one can just use “View Source Code” and copy-paste the HTML, CSS, JS, et al. into their own program.
I just tried it out myself with this theme from Themeforestmobdro and I was able to copy most of the site from the preview (some parts are a bit messy).
My question is: are there functionalities that are impossible to get without buying the website, or is it all just essentially running on the honor system?
copy any theme and use illegally is not permitable. Copyright violation. Also you will facing problem when time will come to update the theme, update theme bundle plugin. You will not get any bundle plugin. You website can crush or down anytime if you use any theme illegally.
If you buy the theme then you will get the theme main source code, a license to use for your website, original theme bundle plugins and also you will get 6 month Author support from the theme Author. and lifetime free update of the theme.
I’m sure plenty of people have started out by just copying and pasting bits of html they found through view source. But stealing the entire source with assets is simply unethical to say the least.
Buying a finished product on the other hand is a whole other experience. It is convenient to just buy and get the complete package along with included documentation.
Then there is the part of maintainence and quite frankly for what it costs, the amount of work required to put together a template through view source is not worth the hassle.