Questions about giving credit to theme developers/copyright

  • Resolved zena1939

    (@zena1939)


    11 years, 9 months ago

    Hello,
    I have a question about copyrights and giving credit where its due. If you make a website using a theme are you allowed to claim that you made the website without giving credit to the wordpress theme maker or explicitly stating what theme was used in developing the site?
    This question has been bugging me for awhile.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer and this can’t be considered legal advice of any kind. ??

    It depends completely on the licence for the theme or plugin/s that you’re using. Anything that’s downloaded from the www.ads-software.com website is GPL-licensed so you can make any changes that you want as long as you leave the copyright notices intact. I don’t believe that this would include any “credits” on the public-facing part of the site (like ‘Theme by Other Theme Designers’).

    However, it would be at least unethical for you to claim that you fully developed a theme if it’s someone elses work, or you’ve just done a few modifications to it.

    Thread Starter zena1939

    (@zena1939)

    Okay. I was just wondering. And no, I never claimed that I fully developed a particular theme. Its just seems the lines are blurred. On one hand I made some changes to the css and the layout of the theme and the websites content. But one the other hand I did not fully create. Maybe I’m just making things complicated.People use frameworks like Twitter’s Bootstrap and Foundation as well and that not copyright infringement.

    Thread Starter zena1939

    (@zena1939)

    I guess when it all said in done everything is technically WordPress technology.

    WordPress and the themes from this site are all GPL – you should read and understand that if you are concerned about this issue:

    https://www.ads-software.com/about/license/

    Not sure what you mean by “everything is technically WordPress technology”??? GPL has no copyright.

    There are many grey areas, yes, and it’s confusing for sure. You can copyright your content and your design, but it’s rather unethical to claim or suggest that the entire site is your work if it was not. One thing that a lot of people do is put a credit to the original theme author in the heading of the CSS file – and perhaps to anyone else credit is due. You can see in some themes that credit is given to Eric Meyer (a CSS guru of sorts) or other people whose work was used in the theme.

    Thread Starter zena1939

    (@zena1939)

    Okay, that explains a lot. Thank you. I didn’t know that you can give credit that way. I’ll be sure to read that link.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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