Author: Richard Best

Readers ask: About reselling commercial plugins (updated)

Published by Richard Best

The questions Following the posts on WordPress themes, the GPL and the conundrum of derivative works and A reader asks: Selling ThemeForest themes outside of ThemeForest, two people from countries far apart have asked me similar questions (albeit possibly from opposite perspectives) regarding the reselling of GPL’d plugins. The first person asked this (I’m paraphrasing): ‘If someone purchases a plugin (or theme) from a commercial plugin (or theme) provider, and then translates it, changes the code and puts it in a marketplace to sell, would that be permissible under the GPL? I’ve seen outfits doing this and I’m not sure how they can do it.’ The second person asked this: ‘As a plugin developer, how can I protect my plugins to prevent people from reselling them, bearing in mind that many plugins are largely PHP/HTML/javascript code with minimal CSS and graphical elements or, in any event, with CSS and graphical elements that might easily be replaced. In these circumstances, a ThemeForest-style split licence might not have much effect. In these circumstances, how can a plugin …

Fake reviewer goes down for defamation

Published by Richard Best

In Negative SEO and legal remedies I noted that one form of negative SEO is “where an unscrupulous person posts fake and negative reviews about a competitor’s goods or services with a view to lowering the competitor’s average popularity ranking and therefore reducing its page rank, e.g., in particular commercial services, for popularity-based searches.” When discussing various potential remedies for negative SEO, I noted that one potential remedy for fake reviews is a civil action for defamation. On 6 March 2015, the English High Court delivered its judgment in a case involving a fake review where the action that was successfully pursued against the wrongdoer was indeed defamation:  The Bussey Law Firm PC & Anor v Page [2015] EWHC 563. I thought I’d give a quick rundown on this case given its relevance to the negative SEO post. The claimants were a law firm and a particular lawyer within the firm who practises law in Colorado, United States. As the Court explained, someone posted a defamatory allegation on the lawyer’s Google Maps profile, alongside a …

How lawyers’ terms for your WordPress business can affect your revenue

Published by Richard Best

So you’re starting an online business You’re starting a WordPress-related business of some sort. You need website terms of use or a privacy policy or software-as-a-service terms for the site. You ask your lawyer to whip something up so that that particular box can be ticked off: “Terms of use, done”. You might be someone who works closely with your lawyer on such issues or you may give your lawyer comparatively free reign. Does it matter? I suggest it does, as I’ll try to show in this post. Three “stories”, if you like, have prompted me to write this post: a story about Pinterest and its early terms of use; a story about some client feedback I had a while ago; and a story about the Envato Studio terms of use as described in Taking care with the IP terms of WordPress development services. I’ll tell the three stories shortly but the point of this post is that the the manner in which lawyers (or others) draft terms of use and other legal terms for …

Taking care with the IP terms of WordPress development services

Published by Richard Best

Setting the scene Does this sound like you? You need to have a custom theme or plugin developed. Or you need help modifying an existing theme or plugin. You need someone to build a WordPress platform of some sort. Or you otherwise need help doing X, Y or Z with your WordPress site or business that, like the other tasks just mentioned, will involve the creation of new software code. You need the work done yesterday, you’re happy to pay a reasonable amount for it and you just want to get on with it. I’ve been in this kind of situation a few times and I’m sure there are thousands out there that either have been too or are in it right now. Rather than going to a known developer (you might not know any), you might turn to one of the WordPress-specific job shops such as codeable or WerkPress or similar services for which WordPress is clearly an important category, such as Elto (formerly Tweaky) or Envato Studio. In your hurry, you may tick …

A reader asks: Selling ThemeForest themes outside of ThemeForest

Published by Richard Best

Questions Alex asks these questions (I’ve amended them slightly): “I have come across sites that are charging to download ThemeForest WordPress themes and are adding a note stating they are licensed under the GPL. I looked a number of those themes up on ThemeForest and they were not licensed under the GPL or were only partially licensed under the GPL. I am planning to sell WordPress themes and would appreciate a clarification as to the licensing that ThemeForest is purporting to use. (As of this writing, very few businesses on ThemeForest have opted to use GPL, so where does that actually place a theme sold on ThemeForest?) A few theme authors have adopted the 100% GPL licensing but the majority have not. With that stated, could someone (such as myself) resell the theme in question, [Hypothetical Theme], by attaching the GPL license? I understand that ThemeForest is claiming they have a totally different license in effect. That seems to be where the confusion is.” These questions could span a number of different scenarios: a theme …

Press This and copyright infringement

Published by Richard Best

Press This and what’s up A helpful reader mentioned to me the other day that an interesting issue has cropped up in discussions within Github on the WordPress “Press This” tool. For those not familiar with this tool, go to “Tools” > “Available Tools” within your WordPress installation, where you’ll find a bookmarklet that you can add to your browser’s bookmarks bar. As explained in your WordPress installation: “Press This is a bookmarklet: a little app that runs in your browser and lets you grab bits of the web. Use Press This to clip text, images and videos from any web page. Then edit and add more straight from Press This before you save or publish it in a post on your site.” This helpful video from WordPress.org explains Press This in more detail: It seems that Press This is being further developed and that this has prompted some community members to think about copyright infringement through the use of this tool. For example, one person asks: “I’m not the best person to comment on …

A reader asks: Theme reviews, CC0, model releases and GPL-compatibility

Published by Richard Best

Question Ulrich asks: “I do theme reviews for the theme repository on WordPress.org. All the code and assets in the theme need to be GPL compatible. I have a few questions about how GPL compatible images work with model releases. The popular GPL compatible image licence is CC0. Can an image be released under CC0 even if there is no model release? Is a CC0 image without a model release GPL compatible? Who is responsible for getting the model release? The photographer, theme author, website owner? Who is liable if a theme with a CC0 image without a model release is used on a pornographic site?” Thanks for the great bunch of questions Ulrich. I appreciate receiving them. Outline and summary Outline Before I jump into the specific questions you’ve raised, I think it may be helpful for some people if we step back from those questions and: sketch out what WordPress.org and the Theme Review Handbook have to say about GPL-compatibility; describe CC0; analyse what is meant by “GPL-compatibility”; and explain why, in my …

Beware of shared hosting and the storage of backups

Published by Richard Best

Backups of your WordPress site or at least your database are essential right? Yes, absolutely, but sometimes you need to be careful where you put them, as I seek to show in this true story. A good number of years ago I assumed responsibility for a non-profit, private sector organisation’s WordPress site and, because money was an issue, a well-known shared hosting provider was used to host the site.  We were mindful of the importance of backup so installed iThemes’ excellent BackupBuddy plugin. Periodically we made full site backups with the plugin. The backups were saved to a backups folder within our WordPress installation on the shared hosting server as well as to a local computer. Some time later I received an unexpected email from the hosting provider which said, among other things: “Your web hosting account for [website url] has been deactivated, as of [a specified date]. (reason: Backups/Storage Constraints) This deactivation was due to a Terms of Service violation associated with your account. At sign-up, all users state that they have read through, …

WordPress-related business brands: protect and do no harm

Published by Richard Best

The significance of WordPress-related brands As I’ve noted in an earlier post, as WordPress has evolved and become more popular, more and more businesses have sprung up in what someone referred to the other day as “the WordPress marketplace”. In addition to Automattic, there are: theme shops: think Array, Elegant Themes, StudioPress, WooThemes, ThemeForest, Themezilla and (one of my minimalist favourites) Elmastudio, among countless others; plugin and app shops: think Rocketgenius’ Gravity Forms, Yoast’s WordPress SEO Premium, the impressive array of WPMU DEV plugins, iThemes’ BackupBuddy, Gravity Wiz, CodeCanyon, Conductor, Reactor by AppPresser, VelocityPage and Pippins Plugins (whose site, I’ve just noticed, has had a super redesign), again among many others; WordPress designers (too many to even start naming); WordPress coding shops: think WerkPress and Envato Studio; WordPress news sites: think WPTavern, again among others; WordPress business consultancy, support services and fora: think Chris Lema, Matt Report Pro, WP Elevation, Post Status Membership Club, WP Site Care and WP Curve; and WordPress security services (like Sucuri). All of these businesses have distinctive brands, the importance …

A reader asks: About populating one’s site with third party content

Published by Richard Best

The question John asks: “My question is about using third party content in my blog. I see a lot of sites using third party content, such as news, at their own site, by simply adding the source reference and link. What are the conventions in that sense? Are we allowed to use an article from another blog/news site as long as we reference the source of the article? Most news sites don’t seem to have any warning about that while others clearly state that this practice is forbidden at their site. For instance, I came across one of them that states the following at bottom of articles: “All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced in print, electronically, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without written permission.” Comments Many thanks for your question John. I assume from your question that, when you talk about using third party content and then adding the source reference and link, you’re talking about reproducing whole articles or at least substantial chunks of articles, together with the reference and …