HI! I paid a lot of money for a theme. There site says that you can install the theme on as many websites as you want but when I asked the representative after paying for it about selling the website with the theme on it. They told me that the new owner will have to pay for another theme which comes with a license each time I sell a site with that theme on it. Can they do this. This makes no sense to me if they’re using the general public license for the theme. I don’t know anything about general public licensing but can they do this. Do I have to have the owner re-buy the theme on the site when they purchase the site to get the licensing. The do not offer separate licenses or a developing themes. All their themes are under the general public licensing. If this is true I will not make much money if the new owner has to pay for this also or even if the price is inserted withing the sale price of the website.
Hard for anyone here to say since we don’t know what the license actually says. A “general public license” can say a great many things. Can you post a link to the theme provider?
The theme is shopperpress.com
Here is what is says somewhat.
All themes provided and sold on this website are copyright to “Premium Press Limited”, by using any any of our products you agree to the terms and conditions below;
- Wordpress Themes
Our themes are licensed under the GNU general public license, our themes may be used by our customers on as many websites as they like.
a) Making Changes to our Themes Upon purchase, you are authorized to make any necessary modifications to my products to fit your purposes.
b) Javascript Most of our themes use JavaScript libraries, which usually have their own license, and do not inherit the GPL license.
- Payment and Delivery
All our payments are processed by Avangate. After your payment has successfully been received and processed, you will received an email with download instructions. If you do not receive an email after 1 hour please contact us with your order ID and we will investigate this for you.
- Ownership
You may not claim intellectual or exclusive ownership to any products offered by “Premium Press Limited”, modified or unmodified. All products are property of “Premium Press Limited”. Our products are provided “as is” without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied. In no event shall our juridical person be liable for any damages including, but not limited to, direct, indirect, special, incidental or consequential damages or other losses arising out of the use of or inability to use our products.
- Theme Support & License Keys
We provide support and license keys for paid customers only. You must provide evidence in the form of a order ID when contacting us for support requests. We do not provide support for customizations or theme changes, we only provide support for technical issues with our themes.
If you are found to be distributing license keys or providing access to our themes without the website owner first purchasing our themes then you’re support access and all existing keys will be stopped.
- Theme Updates
All themes are consistently updated and designed to be compatible with the latest stable version of WordPress (currently 3.0) downloaded from WordPress.org, but we give no guarantee that older versions of my themes will run with future versions of WordPress.
Theme updates are provided free to all paid customers via our customer area.
- Refund Policy
All sales are final. No refunds will be given for software that is delivered via digital download from our site. If there is a problem with one of the digital download products or if you experience any difficulty with its download, we will fix the problem.
- Warranty
“Premium Press Limited” does not warranty or guarantee themes in any manner. We cannot guarantee they will function with all 3rd party components, plugins or web browsers. Browser compatibility should be tested against the demonstration templates on the demo server. Please ensure that the browsers you use will work with the templates as we can not guarantee that our themes will work with all browser combinations.
(Our company reserves the right to change or modify current Terms and Conditions with no prior notice.)
Moving thread to where the experts on this subject hang out.
I read this to be the same as a font license: you can setup as many clients as you wish using the theme, but you can’t give out the theme to other people who would be using it to setup new pages.
“Our themes are licensed under the GNU general public license, our themes may be used by our customers on as many websites as they like.”
So in this case, you are their “customer” and can use the sites on as many sites as you would like, whereas if your customers wanted to take the site you make them and generate other sites from that same template, they would need to also purchase a license to do so.
Of course, IANAL. Maybe other people have a different reading of the license.
Actually, all I want to do is put it on a website modify it and sell it to a client.
“Actually, all I want to do is put it on a website modify it and sell it to a client.”
Then you should be fine. If you want to use it for another client, then you should still be fine.
I am neither a lawyer, but if this is licenced under GPL, then you and your supplier can’t control how it is distributed downstream. The GPL guarantees that recipients can distribute the software as they see fit, unless they want to remove copyright statements or restrict distribution themselves.
HTH, Jochen