Legally Sell or Giveaway PREMIUM WordPress Themes – Comes with Over $1000 Worth of PREMIUM Themes

My Review

How to Leverage the Hard Work and Creativity of Others for Your Own Personal Gain

See Also Bogus Lawsuits and Douchebags Get a Lump of Coal for Christmas

Yep, I purchased this seller’s “product” so that I could provide an informative review of this “product.” This WSO is all about profiting from other people’s hard work, by giving away or selling or leveraging in other ways, Premium WordPress themes and plugins. It’s a tiny pdf that explains GPL licensing for WordPress themes. You can, of course, get all that GPL info for free at the link above or thousands of other places on the Internet for free. There are 3 1/3 pages just talking about GPL. Then there’s two 1/3 pages with all his “creative” ideas on how to monetize all these free premium WordPress themes and plugins. The ideas are a no brainer that anyone with the ethics of this seller could easily conjure up.

The themes he was distributing were old versions of Woo Themes and Gabfire. As an example, I examined six of the Woo Themes he gives a link to and the files were all from 2009. The new Woo framework with all the bells and whistles that provides, plus all the security updates, including timbthumb.php update is not included. Do you know how many updates there’s been to Woo Themes since 2009? A lot.

When this seller was asked if he purchased these and were they downloaded from the source, he said yes, he purchased them in 2010 (liar, liar, pants on fire). When asked to provide proof of purchase, he blew that off. If these were downloaded from the source in 2010, they would not be files from 2009, now would they? I posted the changelogs and a screenshot of one of the 2009 versions he distributed with the version number on it … irrefutable proof that these files had not been downloaded in 2010, as he had said they were. My posts/proof that he is a flat out liar were deleted. Until he was busted, he was distributing 2 year old files that he downloaded from who knows where, containing who knows what malware and links in them.

It’s actually the lure of the Free Premium WordPress themes that are selling this WSO rather than the “course” he’s promoting. If he hadn’t added that little ebook on GPL licensing (which you can find out about all over the Internet for free), the listing wouldn’t even be eligible for a WSO, since none of the themes he is giving away are his work. People love freebies, right?

Listen to this bit of copy from the WSO listing …

I am going to teach you how to legally profit from the hard work of others. Everyday, I leverage the hard work of others to build massive email lists, add huge bonuses to my products (loose description of what he sells), and build loyalty amongst my followers.

It’s all around us… work that is done for us and ready to be leveraged. No, I’m not talking about PLR. I’m talking about WordPress Themes and Plugins.

Premium WordPress themes are big business and my product will show you

How to Legally Sell Premium WordPress Themes and Plugins, while Keeping 100% of the Profits

This of course is a rather parasitic type of business model used by people with not enough talent to produce and distribute their own real products, but hey … if that’s what puts food on his table, good for him. (See Parasitism: Parasitism is a type of symbiotic relationship between organisms of different species where one organism, the parasite, benefits at the expense of the other, the host. There will always be innovators and parasites who live off of innovators. The Internet is full of them … those individuals who exploit the work of others due to their inability to produce anything of value of their own. They live off of other people’s hard work.

Ironically, he is distributing his “course” as an exe file to prevent sharing on the blackhat sites. Seems he would like to protect his “intellectual (and I use that term loosely in this case) property.” Hey Buddy …sharing is caring. Right? And you should have heard him scream and holler like a bitch when another of his products was shared on blackhat sites all over the Internet. Any infringement on his products, whether real or imagined, is met with his wrath and fury, but he doesn’t seem to care about pillaging those who develop WordPress products for his own gain. Legal … yes. He can get away with it legally. Ethical? Moot point. He has no ethics.

If your company wants to develop for WordPress, you have to swallow the GPL licensing for the parts of your code that use core WordPress code. This “software should be free” model is shoved down the throats of any developer that wants to build products to be used with WordPress by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. Contentious? Of course. It’s no secret that Woo Themes and Chris Pearson, the creator of Thesis had bitter confrontations over this issue (and probably many others), but Matt Mullenweg won in the final round and both Woo Themes and the Thesis developer had to swallow this licensing in order to continue developing their themes for WordPress. Quite honestly, if there weren’t talented developers who created themes and plugins for WordPress, I wouldn’t even use WordPress. The default themes given by WordPress are butt ugly and their functionality would be mediocre without the great commercial WordPress plugins available. It took the hard work of theme and plugin developers to make WordPress worth using.

Pillaging for Profit

Matt Mullenweg describes himself as an “Open Source Hippy.”

WordPress.com founder Matt Mullenweg said everything, not just software, should be open source and described himself as an “open source hippie.” Recently, the site’s founder professed his love for all things open source. Mullenweg was cited as saying, “I believe morally and philosophically that not just software, but everything should be open source,” according to ZDNet at the GigaOM Roadmap 2011 Summit in San Francisco, California. Source

From another interview, he describes his philosophy on GPL as being much like the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It’s people like this seller who then exploit the GPL by interpreting it to give them a license to pillage other people’s products for their own personal gain, hardly the real spirit of GPL licensing.

If anyone doubts that it is NOT Woo’s intention that their themes be given away for free, here is the post on their blog that talks about this.

So what does this mean?

The only thing that really changes, is that there’s no more restrictions on a Standard / Single and Developer License i.e. you can use these themes on unlimited domains irrespective of the package you choose (view a comparison of the different packages here).

The themes aren’t free and you still need to buy them! (i.e. there’s no hidden download link somewhere)

Will this one WSO hurt hard working, talented developers of Premium WordPress themes and plugins? Yes, most likely it will. This character has a large following due to pandering to the “Make Money Online Without Really Working” crowd, the same crowd that his given Internet marketers the bad reputation that it currently enjoys. Not only will he give away these premium themes, but his gang has been taught to give away or sell other other people’s work to make a buck, so distribution will be widespread before it’s all over. Does he care that developer’s will be hurt? Of course not. He is a parasite and remember the definition of Parasitism is a type of symbiotic relationship between organisms of different species where one organism, the parasite, benefits at the expense of the other, the host. Note the mention of one organism of a different species. While technically he may be the same species, he’s in the same sub-class of humans that the Wall Street bankers, Bernie Madoff and yes, Gordon Gekko are in. Greed is Good. Anything for a buck to hell with anyone who gets in his way.

Of course in the forum that he frequents, you’ll hear him defending intellectual property rights, but in practice, that sentiment is quickly discarded when he can make a buck from other people’s hard work and get away with it. This seller defends his behavior under the guise of legality. Yeah, it’s legal, but anyone with an ounce of brain matter knows that the companies that develop and sell premium WordPress themes and plugins are in to make money, as they should be.

A lot of hard work, talent and creativity go into those themes, and it should be rewarded. Do the right thing and ignore parasitic charlatans. Reward the people who develop for WordPress and bring so much extra value to the platform. If not … no need to waste $10 on the course that teaches you to profit from other’s hard work. In a nutshell, you can get away with giving away, selling … whatever WordPress themes and plugins under GPL licensing. It does not give you the right to give away the parts of their product that are not licensed under GPL. As an example, the Photoshop files for Woo Themes are not GPL licensed, and therefore cannot legally be distributed, but I doubt that will stand in the way of the crowd that does this sort of thing. Do what he did to monetize. This con artist basically launched a WSO that provided filesharing links to around 70 of these themes. Not only does he make $10 a shot for each sale, but he is building a huge list, so give them away, use them to build a big list, stuff the themes with your ads and links and upload them everywhere, use them to get traffic to your website, use them in a membership site or as bonuses or OTOs, put them up somewhere and charge for them, whatever. He even suggests that you acquire GPL licensed plugins and change the Paypal donation button in them to YOUR Paypal button. Anything goes. There, I just saved you $10 bucks.

WHAT YOU DON’T GET WITH A GPL LICENSE

This seller is distributing these themes via the ordinary filesharing sites that you can find all kinds of stolen and pirated stuff on. There’s no telling what he stuffed them with before uploading. After all, do you trust a theme from a guy who advises in his course to stuff that theme with whatever you want in there, your links and encrypt it to prevent it from being removed?

When you buy a beautiful, highly functional theme from a theme company, let’s say Woo Themes for instance, you get excellent support in their support forum for the theme and you get very timely updates every time WordPress is updated or they add new features, which is often. You also get clean code that is free of malware and spam links.

As in the recent update, some updates are security updates. Woo Themes updated all of their blogs when a vulnerability was discovered with the timthumb.php file that many Premium themes use. You get no support or updates from themes that you don’t pay for.

In addition, you never know what kind of malicious coding, backlinks, etc. have been added to these free themes and how it will affect your website. I’ve seen more than one site marked by Google as a malicious site because they were using a free theme that someone distributed with malicious coding embedded in it. That’s the risk you take when you use free themes for your websites.

Because free WordPress themes are so popular, they are a favorite way for spammers, scam artists, and hackers to cash in or just wreak havoc by delivering malware to unsuspecting users. They simply download the themes, alter them by adding base64 encrypted codes in the functions.php file of the themes. When the code is decrypted, they contain malware or spam links. Find out more about malware distribution through free WordPress themes in Anatomy of a Theme Malware and Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else.

The best and safest place to get free WordPress themes is from the WordPress.org official WordPress theme repository. The best place to get Premium WordPress themes are from the theme author’s website. Any other distribution, especially from file sharing sites, is very risky and not worth the few bucks you’ll save by trying to find commercial, free Premium WordPress themes.

It’s up to you to decide whether or not your website is important enough to purchase the themes directly from the vendors and receive clean code that is updated frequently and support is provided. It’s really a no brainer for me, but I build my sites for the long term. I use a lot of Woo Themes … have bought many developer versions of their themes and the support and updates are world class. They’ve fairly recently added a framework to their themes that makes setting the options and adding advertising a real breeze.

Their themes are extremely easy to customize. I use a highly customized version of the Gazette theme for my plrstyle.com sites. The customizations include a larger sidebar for better advertising display and a more attractive header area for customizing your header.

Then there’s the issue of website flipping. Do you really want to use a free theme with no support and questionable coding for the sites you sell? Not me. I want to be able to stand by the themes I use and provide an update or support when necessary.

What it boils down to is that you get what you pay for. Pay nothing … get an old theme, containing possibly malicious coding and backlinks to the distributor’s sites, no updates and no support. Your business is probably worth more than that. I know mine is.