Well, it has been a hard couple of days for me, but I guess it`s been a growing experience too. For those of you that don`t know, I recently opened an online store. Before I started the process, I read and reread the license agreements involved. I know all about the music copyright rules (I preach them myself) and for years now I have refused to use music in any of my slideshows without it being properly licensed first! When I look back at this all now, I totally get that it is the same thing - but it all boiled down to the obscured wording on those complicated extended licenses.
I thought that I was following all of the rules. In hindsight, I truly wish I would have just contacted Envato directly before I started this - it would have saved me a lot of time (and all of that money!) There are lots and lots of requirements, but the main requirements say that if you want to sell the item, you need to buy an extended license (which I did) and make only one final product (which I did) and you had to put work and effort and create a new product (which I did! hours and hours to separate and adjust the parts etc and recreate it , shrink them and then make it all "work" on Proshow ) Anyways, in the end, I thought that I had jumped through all of the hoops and I thought I was following the rules.
It turns out that I was not.
Envato considers ProShow to be a "tool" and so no, we are not allowed to use any of those products to create slides. They also have strict terms on Author Exclusivity - which means that you can't sell that product anywhere else - or in any other format. I did misinterpret those rules, and I feel really bad about it; but it was a mistake - an honest, unintentional mistake. All of the items have been removed from my store (in fact my doors are closed for now, until I can restock the "shelves" with new items that I'm making from scratch). I have spoken with the artists, and have given my apologies. It was not my intention to try to cheat them.
After all of this is said and done, I do thank the two people who brought this issue to my attention (both publicly and privately). It would have been a much bigger problem months down the road.
I am posting this today so that more people might learn from the mistake that I made. And hopefully, if any of us ever run into this type of situation again, we will be able to share this lesson learned and help that person to fix the problem.
PS - Please keep checking my new store, I am still super-excited about using graphic animation in ProShow, and I hope to have it back online soon!
Kindest regards,
Lori Bossert
http://www.memorymagic.cahttp://memorymagicproshowstyles.com