Going to share more input in the community forums here since slack is going away
I know this discussion has been brought up many times in the past but we need to do something about theme piracy
It’s too easy to get around theme licenses checks
It’s too hard to submit unlicensed stores for takedown
Downloading a pirated theme and getting around the license checks can take 60 seconds. Reporting this as a partner can take much longer. I’ve been on a support chat for the past 30 minutes and was just given a link to login as a Shopify staff to submit the report myself.
I agree this needs to stop and something has to be done. But handling it through DMCA is actually straightforward. For example, we submit a monthly DMCA request with a batch of URLs, and the sites usually get taken down in 7 business days, or the merchants remove the theme or end up purchasing it. Once you identify the stores using the theme, the process is easy. Shopify support isn’t helpful for this, so it’s not worth trying to go through them at all.
I am curious how preventing it could possibly work at all.
The only thought from me is not being able to download paid themes at all. Specifically forcing us to need to use the online code editor & theme editor to make changes to them, potentially with some sort of version control built-in. (But that would not stop someone from copying out each file’s contents.)
I understand that would be unrealistic because various developers like to do things certain ways with build tools etc. that take their codebase modifications and outputs a theme that works on a Shopify storefront without any fluff.
Regarding bad actors potentially having access to multiple stores they could in theory, potentially download various themes from them and then strip out the presets, add extra characters, change filenames, etc. — whatever may be necessary to bypass any sort of automated piracy detection. Then they could just reupload them to other stores freely. If they built a tool or asked AI to do the heavy-lifting they could probably do that with a bunch of themes quickly.
Initially there is also likely nothing stopping that person from selling the modified themes outside of the Theme Store for a fraction of what the theme partners charge. I assume with that sort of motivation someone could be willing to try whatever just to make it work.
Personally hoping that AI could be used to determine with some sort of certainty the usage of a paid theme’s code among an uploaded theme if there was no license for that theme already part of the store. (Even if someone renamed things and added extra characters etc. to try to bypass detection.)
Regarding being able to report things easier, I am unsure about how that could work. That is all just speculation though based on what I have heard and assume of automated detection tools but I figured I would add my pair of pennies to the discussion.
There’s already a licensing mechanism in place. The problem is enforcement, it doesn’t work consistently today, and it’s easy to bypass, and that’s what Shopify needs to fix…