Contact us at [email protected] with any questions.
Our themes and plugins are sold in two places: on jkdevstudio.com and on ThemeForest under our author profile. Any other site offering them, including nulled copies and resold downloads, has nothing to do with us. This policy covers what we do about copies we did not sell, and who we sell to in the first place. It is part of our Terms & Conditions, and breaking it breaks them.
Piracy
This is the one subject where we are not relaxed, so here it is plainly.
Nulled and Pirated Copies
Where our commercial products are published without a license, on a nulled site, in a bundle, in a marketplace listing or anywhere else, we file DMCA takedowns. Every time, against every host, mirror and search result we can identify, and we do not negotiate about it. Where a jurisdiction offers more than a takedown, we use that too.
If you are considering running a nulled copy, the practical warning matters more than the legal one: nulled WordPress themes are one of the most reliable ways to get a site backdoored, because whoever stripped the license check had access to every file and no reason to be kind. We cannot help you clean that up, and our Support Policy says so.
Copied Code
Lifting our source into a product of your own is a copyright infringement and we treat it as one. Where we find our code, our markup structures or our assets in somebody else’s commercial product, we pursue it: with the marketplace hosting it, with the host serving it, and where it is worth doing, further than that. Being a developer is not a defense, and neither is a rename.
Breaking the Activation
Anything whose purpose is to get past the license check is a breach of our Terms & Conditions, whether or not it works. A key generator. A patched or repackaged build with the check taken out. A loader that fakes a successful activation. A key that was never issued to you, or one that came bundled with something you bought from somebody who was not us. Probing our activation endpoint for a weakness counts as well. If you are a security researcher and you have found one, write to [email protected] instead. We have never been sorry to hear from one.
Two things follow. We deactivate the license and every activation on it, close the Hub account behind it, and decline a refund under our Refund Policy. And in most countries getting past a technical protection measure is an offence in its own right, separate from the copyright infringement underneath it.
What Happens When We Find a Copy
We look for copies of our software on sites that have not paid for it, and we work through the whole list rather than picking one item off it:
- The host and the CDN: a DMCA notice to whoever is serving the files and to whoever is caching them.
- The registrar: an abuse report against the domain, with the notice attached.
- The money: the marketplace, the ad network or the payment processor, wherever the site earns from it. That relationship is usually easier to end than the site is.
- Search: removal requests for every result that points at it.
- The authorities: where the scale or the money involved warrants it, a report to the police or the copyright body in the country the operator sits in, and in ours.
We do not negotiate about any of it and we do not stop after the first notice. A site that puts the files back gets the list again, and somebody who has done it repeatedly gets all of it at once rather than in order. We do not tolerate piracy of our work in any form, and there is no version of this where waiting us out is the cheaper option.
What Costs Less
Every alternative costs less than a takedown. Buy the license, here or on ThemeForest. Use our free products from the WordPress.org directory, which are GPL and carry no key and no activation at all. Open the live demo of the thing you are considering and click around it before you spend anything. Where we offer a trial, it is on the product’s own page. And if the price is what is stopping a project rather than the product, write to [email protected] and say so. That conversation goes better than most people expect.
Reading Our Code Is Fine
None of this is aimed at people learning from our code. Read it, take an idea from it, work out how something is done. That is what reading code is for. The line is publishing our work as yours.
Who We Sell To
We are a Ukrainian studio based in Ivano-Frankivsk. Russia is waging a war of terror against our country, and Belarus is actively facilitating it. We do not sell to either country, support either government, or make our software available there. This position is non-negotiable. The rest of this section explains how it works in practice rather than arguing for it.
Why We Do Not Sell There
The first reason is the law, and it is not ours to waive. We are a company registered in Ukraine and bound by Ukrainian law, including the sanctions currently in force against the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus, and by the sanctions regimes our payment and distribution partners work under. Those rules govern what can be sold, to whom, through which banks, and into which territories. We do not look for loopholes.
The second is that we could not deliver even if we wanted to. Payments from those countries are not accepted by our merchant of record. Our license and update infrastructure does not respond to requests from there. Support is a working relationship with a studio that is being shelled by one of those countries. Nobody there ends up with a product that works and a service behind it.
What Is Blocked
A site hosted on infrastructure in Russia or Belarus. A domain registered in either country. A company, an invoice, a card or any other payment instrument registered in either country. Occupied Ukrainian territory falls under the same rule, because the servers there answer to the same authorities.
The block sits in our infrastructure, not in a policy someone has to remember to apply:
- Activation: a license key will not activate from there. No warning and no grace period. The request simply fails.
- Updates: an installed copy stops receiving them. Nothing is switched off on a site that is already running, because we do not put a kill switch in anybody’s website, but the version on it is the last one it will get.
- Support: tickets go unanswered and bug reports are not reviewed. Our Support Policy says the same thing.
- Buying: checkout is refused. If a payment gets through anyway, we cancel the license and refund the money. We have no interest in keeping it.
- Appeals: there is no address to write to about this one, and a message about it will not get a reply. Everything else in our policies has a human behind it. This does not.
Conduct
Supporting the invasion ends the relationship, wherever you are and whatever passport you hold. A Z or a V. The ribbon. A profile celebrating a strike on a Ukrainian city, or a public endorsement of one. A company that kept trading there after February 2022 and says so openly. This is about what a person does, not where they were born, and it is the one thing in this policy we act on immediately: the license and all its activations are deactivated the same day, the Hub account is closed, and the money goes back. We are not keeping it, and there is nothing to appeal.
Our Discretion
We are not obliged to sell to anyone. We may decline an order, cancel one after the fact, or close an account at our own discretion and without giving a reason. That is an ordinary commercial right, and we intend to use it. Whenever we do, the money is refunded in full; nobody is left out of pocket by a decision of ours.
Working Around It
Working around any of this is a breach of our Terms & Conditions. A VPN or a proxy. A front-end host in one country while the site is actually served from another. A reseller, an agency buying on behalf of a client there, or a license bought by someone else and handed over. Each of those ends the same way: the license and all its activations are deactivated, the Hub account is closed, and we keep a record so the same buyer cannot come back through a second address.
