The Situation
Digital goods—how do you control them? Stealing a car is hard, but stealing a design file or some other digital good can happen on accident. This page is about preventing those accidents (since we can’t really stop you if you want to distribute this stuff illegally on-purpose).
How accidents happen
We hope that you’ll try an Art /Rhetor design file for your next project. We even hope you’re so pumped after using it that you’ll want other people to see what it was like—how well we’ve labeled our layers, provided alternate colors, made photo recommendations, etc. But here’s where the slip can happen: in your enthusiasm, you might attach that ZIP file to an email and swoosh it off to your friend at Sample Church. He or she could open it and put it into rotation at Sample Church without a second thought. This is not the end of the world, but it isn’t how this is supposed to work.
Why it’s a bummer
We’re an actual mom-and-pop design firm with two cute kids and we all have major sparkling water needs. We’ve worked some insanely late nights and weekends to bring you this stuff and we think we’ve priced it to be really accessible. We know that the value of a digital good is really hard to process! One way to think about it is that each time a file gets passed around, the output of our vocational efforts to make that original sale gets halved and halved again. We’re so glad if it’s awesome enough to be used all over the place, but there’s a more awesome way to do that…
The better way
As good as the design file is that you may be tempted to share, there are way more options for your friends on our store. You may have thought Collection Two was great, but they might be like, “Oh but Collection Ten fits our brand a lot better.” However, once “free” has been the price of an Art /Rhetor design file them after getting a freebie from you, $40 for different file is going to seem like a lot, and they may never explore further. But $40 isn’t a lot for this level of work (we sincerely believe that), so instead of hustling that .ai in 2019 like an .mp3 in 2004, direct them to artrhetor.com to explore for themselves. We made many different things in many different styles and we’re excited to see what people use and how.
Terms of Use
We’ve covered this in a way more technical manner over on our Terms of Use page in case you want to see how all this works legally. Either way, thank you for reading all this stuff and protecting intellectual property.