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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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’.
