Lately I have seen more services advertised on Fiverr and other platforms offering to “fix theme licensing issues” and bypass Shopify’s new licensing detection. Trying to figure out how to bypass detection I tried modifying or removing key parts of the premium theme, however the solution is much easier.
In order to bypass the theme licensing restriction so that you can customize or publish an unlicensed, pirated premium theme here are the simple steps to instantly unlock it.
- Open the Action required: licensing issue menu
- Click “provide some information”
- For “Where did you get this theme?” select Other
- Add any text into the details field
- Submit the form
This will instantly unlock the theme for the store allowing you to manually upload any theme version bypassing the licensing check. The use and enforcement of unlicensed themes is a major issue for Shopify Partners that are creating premium themes, and there should be some type of review, verification or even a manual approval process by the copyright owners.
7 Likes
Following up on this. This workaround to help facilitate piracy is something that is being widely shared on YouTube and social media. Especially if you search in languages other than English.
Additionally, it’s a growing task / service being offered on Fivver.
Can we please get a response on this from someone at Shopify? These videos prove it takes just a few seconds to bypass theme license checks.
The Theme Store has a responsibility to protect our IP when we list on themes on it. The solutions are not complex, but we can’t even get responses on these forums acknowledging the matter.
still no one from Shopify team pay attention to this issue
1 Like
In addition to the bypass issue, there appears to be another problem related to theme licensing.
When a user bypasses the license for any one theme created by Theme Designer One, all other themes from the same designer can also be customized and published without triggering any unlicensed-use warning.
It seems that licenses are not assigned per theme; instead, the system treats each designer as having a single shared license across all their themes.
@Liam-Shopify could anyone from Shopify theme team, please, look into this issue, since it’s ruining the theme partners’ business. I remember Nic Day used to respond to us in Slack.
The anti-piracy check was supposed to help us with such cases, but in the end made the situation even worse.
