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Comment by photomatt | Hacker News Reader

The trademark originally belonged 100% to Automattic. It transferred it to the Foundation, and retained the commercial license and the ability to commercially sub-license. The Foundation gave me a license to run WordPress.org. This has all been public, though I agree it's complicated and not widely understood.

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I understand the workings of the trademark. The question I asked of you (that you avoided) is why did you claim that the trademark was "fully independent from any company" and that Automattic had "give[n] up control". [0]

That's demonstrably untrue. The assignment on file with the USPTO is clear:

>WordPress Foundation, a California nonprofit public benefit corporation, ... hereby grants to Automattic Inc., an exclusive, fully-paid, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sublicensable right and license to use and otherwise exploit the trademarks identified in Exhibit A attached hereto...

Why did you lie, Matt?

[0] https://ma.tt/2010/09/wordpress-trademark/

I’m curious: what else is there to a trademark? Nominal ownership may lie with the Foundation, but if they’ve granted “irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic” (as claimed in this lawsuit), what else is there? Maybe there is something, I’m no lawyer or particularly deeply familiar with trademark law, but it sounds to me like, for all practical purposes, ownership belonging to the Foundation is a furphy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furphy>.

(This is an honest question.)

I guess one difference is that if the company ceases to exist it falls back to the foundation and there might be classes around acquisition etc.

> The Foundation gave me a license to run WordPress.org.

The Foundation? You mean, you, a retired, inactive coder (as far as I could tell, or near enough) and oh yeah, one of those "freeloading leeches", as you described Private Equity... a Managing Partner, in fact?

Weird that you never mentioned that this license was granted on the same day it was transferred.

> though I agree it's complicated and not widely understood

He didn't say it was complicated or that he didn't understand it.

He said it was un-true and it is.

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