If you haven’t read it, Photo Matt has a fantastic article called the Price of Freedom. This is the best article Mari has read in a month. Mari agrees with everything Matt said.

Mari can see this applying to people who offer graphics, layouts, WordPress themes, and things of that nature on their site. Whether or not you spent a fortnight making something, whether or not you put all your creative force into it: if you choose to distribute it on your site, whether or not it’s open source, getting the credit you deserve depends on respect.

And here’s the thing: you can’t demand respect. Some people will automatically give you the respect you deserve. For some people, you’ll have to earn their respect. Some people will never respect you. That’s just how it is.

If someone doesn’t respect you, they will take everything you have made and claim it as their own. Get this: most of the time, you’ll never find out. Unless you actively search for your code with things like Google Code Search, and have hundreds of regular visitors who all look all over the Internet to see if your stuff’s been stolen…you’ll never know about most of the people deliberately claiming your creations as theirs. There are over 6,000,000,000 people in this world, and a good deal of them have internet access. It is mathematically impossible to find each person who rips off your creativity.

On the rare chance that you do find a “stealer” or “copier”…

The most negative thing you can do is start some e-drama and “call them out” as a “steelur!!1!one!” on some forum and get your web posse to attack their site. A few outcomes of that situation are:

A) Your attacks may make them feel a little guilty, but more than likely they’re going to try to spam your site and say it’s theirs…and it all just turns into a big nasty internet fight.

B) They will automatically apologize, because they respect you, or because you were so vicious.

C) They won’t respond at all. If so, you end up sending cease and desist letters, and contacting their host. Usually, if it’s a free-hosted site, they’ll have a “report abuse” button. If they’re hosted on a subdomain of a personal domain, usually the host will kick them off no questions asked. But if they have their own domain, you have to find out their hosting company and who they registered the domain with…and it’s usually more work than it’s worth.

Contacting them calmly is the best way to go about things if your stuff wasn’t open source. If you don’t find an email on the site, just do a whois lookup. Usually there’s an email listed there. Email them calmly, maybe even wait a day, and ask why they removed your credit. WHATEVER THEY DO OR SAY, don’t be a jerk. If you keep a calm head, even the most explosive situation can be defused.

If what you do is open source and someone’s removed your credit link, don’t feel bad. They wouldn’t have left it there whether it was open or not. Just take pride in the people who do leave the link and do respect you, and treat them well.