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Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

As I understand it the claimed trademark infringement is WPE saying they ‘provide WordPress hosting’. If they are successful can anyone built an opens source hosting business?

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If WordPress won on the trademark infringement issue, it would be a fundamental rewriting of trademark law as it exists in the U.S. today.

Companies even competitors are allowed to use trademarks when they are making factual statements, like "we provide Wordpress hosting" as long as they make it clear that they are not the trademark holder (i.e., confusing customers). Even before they revamped their website, WP Engine was very clear about being a third party provider for hosting WordPress blogs. They weren't claiming to be the original WordPress, or the original WordPress hosting provider, or anything similar.

In that case I have no idea why Automattic would attempt to try to get WPE to license the trademark.

Based on Matt's voluminous posts yesterday, the concept of the law isn't really relevant to how he run's WordPress.org or Autommatic.

He admitted to violating labor laws and non-profit tax laws, and perpetuated several ongoing torts. He had a very productive day; it explains why he had to hire one of the most sadistic corporate lawyers in America.

Perhaps if they were called WPHosting, but WPEngine sounds very like core wordpress.

I have no opinion on this one way or the other, but when I saw WPEngine, I thought it was core wordpress.

I am not sure which way this will go, but WPE's website was using the word "WordPress" in every possible way before they 'cleaned it up' a few days ago. I am not sure whether it was trademark infringement, but they did seem to be leaning heavily on the trademarked term. I compared WPE's website to Dreamhost's (as I am familiar with the latter as a provider of hosting for WordPress-based websites), and the latter used the term far more sparingly.

Fair enough - I can see there are limits but the material in Automattic’s lawsuit didn’t seem that problematic. Not sure how the law can distinguish between ok and too much use of ‘WordPress’.

This is exactly what trademark law is set up to do: https://www.uspto.gov/page/about-trademark-infringement

I’m not a lawyer, but why would they remove uses of WordPress from their website right before suing Automattic if their position is that they weren’t violating the trademark?

That’s easy - limiting potential liability if they lose. It’s not an admission of guilt though.

> but WPE's website was using the word "WordPress" in every possible way before they 'cleaned it up' a few days ago

https://wpengine.com/ mentions "wordpress" 56 times today.

And here is the website from a month ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20240903110405/https://wpengine...., still 56 times "wordpress" is mentioned.

Looks mostly the same to me, at least compared to a month ago.

It would give a lot of power to trademark policies.

Mozilla has one of the stricter trademark policies but it's for a good reason and the community mostly trusts them. WordPress not so much.

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