All posts filed under: Copyright

Theme and plugin shop terms of use versus GPL freedoms

Published by Richard Best

Introduction For a while now I’ve wanted to address an issue that niggles away at me every time I see it. I touched on the subject slightly at the end of Readers ask: About reselling commercial plugins (updated) but I wanted to explore it a bit more in its own post. There are so many theme and plugin shops out there now that you probably couldn’t count them all with even 20 hands. Perhaps not surprisingly, this multiplicity of WordPress businesses has resulted in a wide range of terms of use and licensing statements in relation to the themes and plugins they sell. Of course, what these businesses say in their terms is constrained – or should be constrained – by the requirements of the GPL, at least in situations where they’ve created derivative works of WordPress or other GPL’d code or where they’ve otherwise chosen to apply the GPL to their themes or plugins. In this post, I’m going to focus on theme and plugin shops that have expressly applied – or purport to …

How not to source images for your client’s websites

Published by Richard Best

If you’re a designer who source images for a client’s website, do you ensure you and your client have the right to use them? An interesting wee tale A UK case from 2012 provides a number of important reminders for those who design and own websites, including public sector agencies (Hoffman v Drug Abuse Resistance Education (UK) Ltd [2012] EWPCC 2 (19 January 2012)). It’s an interesting tale about a website owner who copied photos from another website in the mistaken belief that they were Crown copyright photos that could be re-used without permission when, in fact, they could not. There’s a photographer, a charity, a web developer, a government-sponsored website, the photos and … a copyright infringement claim. This isn’t a WordPress-specific story, but one that may be of interest to some WordPress users. Briefly, the main facts appearing from the judgment are these: Mr Hoffman was the copyright owner of a range of photos of drugs; the defendant charity published copies of those photos on its website; the defendant had used a web …

Using stock imagery in your or a client’s WordPress site – beware of the terms of use

Published by Richard Best

Introduction A designer friend once let me in on a secret, a secret she described as “the designer’s little secret”. She was referring to istockphoto.com as a preferred source of reasonably priced images for commercial and other use. That was many years ago now. Since that time istockphoto has become a part of Getty Images (and is now known as iStock) and we’ve seen a proliferation of competing stock imagery sites such as shutterstock.com, graphicriver.net, mychillybin.co.nz, dollarphotoclub.com, dreamstime.com, bigstockphoto.com and fotolia.com among many others. Stock images are everywhere these days, including on the pages of WordPress-driven websites the world over. I’ve used them, for both myself and clients, and I’ve reviewed the terms of use of multiple stock imagery sites that clients have been thinking of using, with a view to alerting them to risks of which they may need to be aware. Now here’s the thing: not all stock imagery websites are made equal. I’m not talking about the range, quality or cost of their images, but of the terms of use that govern …

Using Creative Commons licensed images on your site with confidence

Published by Richard Best

Introduction As many readers will know, when sourcing images for your blog or website, you can’t just do a Google images search, find an image you like, copy it and insert it in your post editor. Well, you can, physically, but legally this is a recipe for copyright infringement. If you don’t have your own images, two common alternatives are to: purchase a licence to images from the likes of iStock, Shutterstock and Bigstock; or find and use images that have been either licensed under a Creative Commons licence or released into the public domain under CC0 (pronounced CC zero). In this post, I’m going to focus on the latter: Creative Commons. Whilst some people are familiar with Creative Commons licensing, many people are not, particularly if they’ve had no need to use Creative Commons-licensed material in the past or to release material under a Creative Commons licence. For this reason, I’m going to: introduce Creative Commons and its licences; and explain how to comply with the attribution requirements that are common to all of …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Negative SEO and legal remedies

Published by Richard Best

The negative SEO campaign against WP Site Care By now, many in the WordPress community will have heard of the negative SEO campaign against WP Site Care that Ryan Sullivan, its founder, described in Negative SEO: Destroying Businesses One Spammy Backlink at a Time. On this occasion, the negative SEO attack appears to have been caused by voluminous backlinks, including a “spike in unnatural links from lots of unsavory sources over the course of a few days” which, in turn, appears to have caused a plummet in Google rankings. Ryan explains that his company’s bottom line suffered a significant hit as a result of the lower traffic volumes to the site and that they were able to trace the backlink attack back to the source: someone within the WordPress community. He says: “They did everything through a third-party, an internet hitman of sorts, to try and cover their tracks, but they weren’t quite careful enough and we were able to uncover where everything started.” Ryan exercised considerable restraint in not naming any names when, it …