I don’t know whether it is legal or not. I think the main purpose of keeping that is for advrt. as well as to earn some through your sites. please give the author some credit.
you can remove from footer.php under the wp-content/themes/your_themes
remove the following may work;
[ Moderator note: code fixed. Please wrap code in the backtick character or use the code button. ]
<a>">
<?php _e( 'Free WordPress Theme', 'accesspresslite' ); ?></a>
<span class="sep"> | </span>
<a href="<?php echo esc_url('https://accesspressthemes.com/');
?>" title="AccessPress Themes" target="_blank">AccessPress Lite
Moderator
Jan Dembowski
(@jdembowski)
Forum Moderator and Brute Squad
It is 100% legal and anyone who tells you it’s not is misleading you. 😉
But don’t do it this way. When the theme is updated you will lose all of your changes. Instead create and activate a child theme of this one, make a copy of the footer.php file into the child theme directory and then edit that copy.
https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
That way you will not lose your changes when the theme get’s updated.
