ConservaBlogs Liberty Wordpress Theme
February 20, 2008
Welcome to the Liberty Wordpress Theme page. There is good news, and there is bad news. Let’s get to the bad news first.
A few months back we talked with a freelancer about getting a Wordpress Theme set up for us to give away for free. We wanted something political, as we are a political site. After a couple of weeks we received a concept that we all liked and the freelancer sent us the files. I posted the theme here, and since then it has seen several hundred downloads.
The Bad News
The theme, as I have only just discovered, is not in any way original. In fact, it is almost completely ripped from Sadish over at WP Rocks. The images were changed and the visual side of things were moved around quite a bit, but the code structure, much to my surprise, was not in any way different from the original theme design.
While I’m writing this I want to go ahead and apologize to Sadish, as I commented before actually looking at the code myself. I’ve seen MANY very similar WP designs in my years of blogging and I made the mistake of trusting the freelancer over Sadish without looking for myself.
As you can see in a WP Rocks post titled Ripoff or Not You Tell Me, Sadish is quite concerned about this, as he should be.
I’ll be honest here in saying that I pretty much ignored this all until last night when Ryan over at PixoPoint contacted me with a well mannered explanation of what was going on. I’ve got many projects going on right now and I haven’t, until now, had a chance to get out and read the comments on other sites. Thanks to Ryan, I now fully understand what is happening, and I’m siding with Sadish on the theme.
So, there you have it… the Liberty Theme is a ripoff of the Seashore Theme. I’ve contacted the freelancer and have yet to hear anything back from her. I see that there are several comments on her blog as well, so hopefully she will address this issue soon.
The Good News
The good news is that Sadish still offers his SeaShore Theme for free, and you can download it here.
I’ll be talking with Sadish over the next few days to see if we can come to an agreement with the idea of re-releasing the Liberty Theme as a mod of SeaShore and give full credit in the footer to Sadish.
More on that soon.
Best Regards,
-Eric Odom
FreshySEO.com
Comments
33 Responses to “ConservaBlogs Liberty Wordpress Theme”
Got something to say?
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Exposing It
Great theme. Downloaded it. Now for the fun part, right?
Right?
-MT
Michael Tams’s last blog post..Bush: Keep Abstinence in AIDS Program
I wonder if I can use it in Typepad somehow.
I will see If I can figure it out
stix1972’s last blog post..test
@ Tams
Heh… indeed!
@Doug
I’m not sure the WP code structure will work with Typead out of the box. You can probably edit it quite a bit and tweak it until it will, but out of the box I don’t think it will.
Eric,
How would I go about changing my site. I don’t have access to upload files and if I did, I wouldn’t know where I could put them. Can you advise?
Thanks,
Sam
Sam Pierce’s last blog post..Chertoff gets tough on virtual illegal aliens
Sam,
I uploaded the theme for you. Let me know if you need anything else.
-Eric
Eric,
Thanks! I am still unable to upload files and can’t edit the sidebar, header, and footer of the new theme. Can you change that?
Sam
Sam Pierce’s last blog post..Chertoff gets tough on virtual illegal aliens
Changed.
LOL, I have been holding out asking as long as I can…
I might need some help, but will continue to try and get this thing figured out on m’own.
-MT
Michael Tams’s last blog post..My Appeal to Social Conservatives
MT,
Ask away! I’m happy to help anytime.
-Eric
Got it - since I’m still arranging things, I’ll show ya tomorrow.
-MT
Michael Tams’s last blog post..My Appeal to Social Conservatives
Looking forward to it.
Thanks for theme! Love it.
Jenn Grover’s last blog post..Huckabee on Obama’s Speech
You’re quite welcome, Jenn!
Cool theme. I think’ll try it after tweaking it a bit to fit my specifications.
Very nice theme. I’m going to use it for my political blog.
Liberty is a copy of my original theme called Seashore, released at http://wpthemeshop.com/free-themes/ long time back.
Sadish
Sadish,
This theme isn’t a “copy” of anything. Gazelle Creative built the theme from scratch. None of your images were used, and the code is original.
Just because two themes have very similar layouts (and MANY do!) does not mean one is copied.
That being said, thanks for stopping by.
-Eric
[…] Liberty […]
[…] ConservaBlogs Liberty — simple, three-column theme. You may change the header quickly at the Dashboard. Use it for liberal and radical blogs. Hehehe. Due to its simple style, I chose and installed it yesterday. Thanks to darckedesigns for designing my header based on ~becominginvisible’s keyboard_2. […]
[…] Oficial: Liberty en ConservaBlogs Etiquetas: sitio, soporte, tema, temas, […]
[…] Liberty […]
[…] When I asked them about this, they said, it is not a copy and they built the theme from scratch. See the comments section on this post. […]
LOL, how silly of you.
Of course this is a copy of Sadish’s theme. How on earth can you claim otherwise? A quick look at the source code shows that your theme is based on his.
It seems as though Eric fully believes that the Gazelle Creative design company which appears to be run by one person has actually created that theme from scratch. Eric, a number of people have dived into both themes and it’s pretty apparent that the Liberty theme was not designed by scratch. Although the copyrighted images have been changed so as to not violate Sadish’s copyrights, people have noticed that even the div’s are named the same and just about the entire branch of the CSS code is the same between the two. There is also confusion as to the licensing in Sadish’s theme which would of helped out in determining the validity of the Liberty theme.
Thanks Jeff,
I suppose I can see where you might be coming from. So I guess peeps who have questions can direct them to Gazelle, the theme creator, not me.
-Eric
Yeah, I’ve just commented on WLTC to try and move the conversation over to the liberty theme author’s blog. It’s been a hot and heavy debate over at WeblogToolsCollection.com and so, I hope this adds just a little bit of closure on our end and yours and get these people to complain to the one responsible for the theme.
Jeffr0 - Changing the images does not avoid copyright.
[…] Liberty- Red Themed with image of Lady Liberty […]
Please see the updated post for the latest on the Liberty Wordpress Theme…
Lol, I thought I was quite blunt and rude about it. But glad to be of help
I think many of these problems stem from lack of knowledge/ignorance of copyright laws by many theme designers. Hopefully as the theme designing industry matures these types of problems will become less of an issue as knowledge of what is and isn’t allowed will become more widespread - hopefully.
@ Ryan: I didn’t find it to be rude at all. I very much appreciated the note!
was there an apology to Sadish?
I am disappointed that there was no “sorry” words from Eric in this article.
Andrew,
Not sure how well you’re paying attention to this, but apparently you missed the part where I had nothing to do with the “ripping off” of this theme.
Perhaps you should go back up and re-read the post, and then go and talk with the person who actually sent me the theme files.
-Eric