I want my clients to register to me

I am loosing hundreds of dollars every week, and every time I kill some share links, I get sales almost instantly. Makes sense that our clients support this phenomena as more and more people come to ask for support but they don’t confirm any purchase. The freshkiller is fine but more and more share sites come up and makes it useless, unless we have access to the list of share sites configuration inside freshkiller.

Because of the above, I have decided to create a protection system and I want to know if Envato will support the idea.

• the user purchases and installs the item
• the item page is informing the potential client that the file is protected and an activation code will be required in order to enable the item, and the activation code is only interchangeable with his information: domain name, domain holder name, domain holder mail address and his purchase code
• the item does not work and requires an activation code to be pasted in the theme/template admin panel
• the user will then be instructed to send a message via my profile page requesting activation code and he has to provide the above mentioned info (domain name, domain holder name, domain holder mail address and his purchase code)
• after I have registered my new client I am sending him the activation code and warn him again: not to share my file or I will use this information in court as proof against any copyright violation he could possibly do
• regular updates can take place to update the activation code along with other feature updates and etc

• increased security and more sales, as nobody will dare to share my file as he is registered to me and cannot do much
• I don’t have to send millions of DMCA notices everyday and spend me hours, but I take 5-10 minutes/day to register my clients and send then ONE e-mail with the activation code.

• more updates will come into place for the reviewers to accept
• the review process takes a few minutes more as the reviewers will also require this activation code, but if I send it over along with the upload submission comment, I guess that’s fine
• some potential clients could consider this too much for a template and would still prefer a free shared item or a cheaper item, or just an item without this restriction

SO what do you say?

ON another side of the problems I think we should approach the hosting companies to delete the illegal activity websites, with our items linked inside them as proof of illegality and ask them to moderate their users’ websites content. For this I think we need to team up and send SITE TAKEDOWN notices and not just links… the links into their content will be updated and we have to do this again and again and again. We must be more aggressive.

Ok first of all, i get it, you dont want your items to be stolen, i think no one here does.

But this idea – it pops up in one form or another every 4 weeks – is just plain horrible.

1. You assume that everyone who steals your item would be buying it if he couldnt steal it, that is just wrong, its the same with hollywood studios claiming they lose billions of dollars, hey just because someone was bored enough one day to watch that lousy b-movie of yours on the internet doesnt mean he also would have gone to the theater if he couldnt watch it online.

Im not saying piracy is not a serious problem or people dont lose money with it and im not saying we should be fine with it, but this assumption of one pirate equals one lost customer is just a joke.

2. Once again, as always with those ideas, you punish the honest people – entering all this information, sending you an email, waiting for your response – really?

3. You make it impossible for resellers to purchase an item, install it locally on their server, change things and then install it on their clients server because you only allow them to install it once, so they are stuck after their local machine. Plus if you do some work arounds for that im sure their client would be jumping in joy when asked to give all those information.

4. The themeforest licence allows for a theme to be run on one domain, which means a buyer can install it on a domain and if he so chooses he can deinstall it on that domain and then install it again on another domain – now that wouldnt work with only one activation key.

5. All those systems are laughable easy to crack – go ahead and ask EA, Activision or whatever gaming company trying to do this for years now how good their solution works and how many customers just plain hate them for it. So all you do is make it a tiny bit harder for pirates to upload a cracked version and make it a big hustle for honest buyers and resellers.

6. A bazillion more reasons which im too lazy to write down. (ok im lying its probably not quite a bazillion)

@ Everyone coming up with ideas like that every month – please stop punishing honest people instead of the pirates who just laugh at useless security measures like that anyway. Antagonizing honest people will only decrease sales and increase piracy.

Many people come here to get a cheap solution for their website, they often cant even be bothered to check the big fat “Help” link in the navigation when their stylesheet is “missing”, im sure they would appreciate going through such a process in order to get their 35$ item working.

squaredWeb said
Many people come here to get a cheap solution for their website, they often cant even be bothered to check the big fat “Help” link in the navigation when their stylesheet is “missing”, im sure they would appreciate going through such a process in order to get their 35$ item working.

I am sorry for you but I don’t provide cheap items and never will, I also don’t work for free.

dnp_theme said
I am sorry for you but I don’t provide cheap items and never will, I also don’t work for free.

I am sorry if i offended you, the “cheap” was only meant regarding the price, not the quality of your items, and seeing that your most expensive item costs 45$, that is just pretty cheap – again only regarding the price – and one of the biggest reasons people buy their theme here.

But if they were to also “buy” that register process a lot of them might change their mind.

Just to add, a lot of those share site pirated themes have malicious code in there, waiting for you to input sensitive data. Leave em to it I say, they will learn the hard way when they get hacked, money stolen etc.

So if they are serious about their website they will eventually buy your theme from the right place. I wouldn’t worry to much about it.

The sooner people realise this the better.

People who steal, will always steal, no matter what you do. I say that it’s purely coincidence that you get sales after tracking down a piracy site.. And i really don’t think that you loose that amount of money because your theme is offered for free. All those people who steal your theme will never buy it.

Even if your idea has some good sense in it, if it were to be implemented in the way you described, you’ll loose all your clients. If i would buy a theme and find out that i would have to make such complicated steps in order to make it run, i’ll instantly rate it one star and never buy from you again.

I personally stopped fighting pirates a long time ago. Just don’t care anymore

Antech thanks for your support in this. I realize more and more that the best to do is to team up and take them down completely from their host over and over till they don’t have any place to go and feel hastle to re-upload over and over.

If we can team up let’s say 50 authors in a raid to take down websites with links to share, they won’t bother to do this anymore.

But most people like to just send DMCA letters and no more than that.

RubenBristian said
I personally stopped fighting pirates a long time ago. Just don’t care anymore

Yes, the right thing is to ignore it. Because if Microsoft, Adobe etc. couldn’t stop it then how can we?

RubenBristian said
People who steal, will always steal, no matter what you do. I say that it’s purely coincidence that you get sales after tracking down a piracy site.. And i really don’t think that you loose that amount of money because your theme is offered for free. All those people who steal your theme will never buy it.

Even if your idea has some good sense in it, if it were to be implemented in the way you described, you’ll loose all your clients. If i would buy a theme and find out that i would have to make such complicated steps in order to make it run, i’ll instantly rate it one star and never buy from you again.

I personally stopped fighting pirates a long time ago. Just don’t care anymore

Well perhaps you have some client base already, of course you don’t worry, but authors like me, still fighting to reach your point I have to do this mass take down as each sale is important for me.

LucidStudios said

RubenBristian said
I personally stopped fighting pirates a long time ago. Just don’t care anymore

Yes, the right thing is to ignore it. Because if Microsoft, Adobe etc. couldn’t stop it then how can we?

Because they know the best promotion is viral and file sharing is the way to deliver, and they admitted, at least I know Microsoft did.