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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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

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