[wp-forums] Comment about [sticky] Posts requests for theme decoding in here

[Chris Olbekson]

I understand how this thread:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/388507?replies=108 is very helpful
to users by protecting them from all the spam links and what not but
it is also encouraging the use of pirated themes.  Most of the decode
requests I went through were from premium themes that are posted all
over torrent and download sites.  Some of the themes are GPL so I
guess they have the right to do whatever they want with the them, but
some of the decode requests are for code from non GPL copyrighted
themes.  The users of these pirate and warez download sites don't just
happen to stumble on them.  There are some who seek them out and even
make requests for them then we go and sanitize the theme for them and
they get to use a $70 or $80 premium theme for free.
I also understand that we might not even be able to tell what the
original theme was by only seeing a small portion of the code so that
is another issue.  But bottom line we can be fairly certain that the
theme either came from the repository and got modified or it was
ripped off from a theme company.

--Chris Olbekson