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WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

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Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#221

Post by keane »

mthoms wrote: post #208
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does WPF take issue with this operational decision by Automattic? If so, they have the avenues to deal with it, and they're the party who can claim to be aggrieved, if it violates some duty Automattic has to WPF. I seems more like this, from my understanding: You sell a brand of aspirin in your shop. The brand has outsourced most of the production and decision-making to another company. That company puts messages on…

Here's the thing. Guess who is the head of the WordPress Foundation? Matt Mullenweg. CEO of Automattic. Now guess who The WordPress Foundation granted sole rights to sub-license their trademarks? You guessed it. Automattic. Yeah, it gets worse the more you look at it.

Automattic originally registered the trademark WordPress. They donated it to the WordPress Foundation while retaining a commercial license to the marks. https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-wordpress-foundation/

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#222

Post by mrwyz »

echoangle wrote: post #215
mrwyz wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how U.S. trademark law works.

Do you want to explain how it does work? And what exactly that I said is wrong? Here’s the Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use

The law is not black-and-white. Absolutes like "Everyone can use your Trademark to identify the thing" don't fit in this context. Your reliance on Wikipedia to summarize a doctrine further demonstrates you don't have a firm grasp on the subject. Of course none on HN should listen to legal interpretations (including mine) because it's often not that simple. You can get a glimpse of the issue by reading this commentary from the American Bar: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law...

I think (and that's my opinion) that a jury would see that what wpengine is doing is not fair use and that their offering is creating confusion among consumers, but that's not for me (or you, or anyone else here on HN) to decide.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#223

Post by echoangle »

mrwyz wrote: post #222
echoangle wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you want to explain how it does work? And what exactly that I said is wrong? Here’s the Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use

The law is not black-and-white. Absolutes like "Everyone can use your Trademark to identify the thing" don't fit in this context. Your reliance on Wikipedia to summarize a doctrine further demonstrates you don't have a firm grasp on the subject. Of course none on HN should listen to legal interpretations (including mine) because it's often not that simple. You can get a glimpse of the issue by reading this commentary…

Well I’ll be ready to watch the lawsuit for trademark infringement then. Except there won’t be one because there’s no chance that’s trademark infringement. All the statements on the website of WP engine (as I currently see it of course) don’t imply any affiliation with the Wordpress trademark owners and are pretty factual. Do you have some more explicit reasoning for statements on the website that you find infringing?

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#224

Post by keane »

mthoms wrote: post #220
keane wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paragraph prior: >All other WordPress-related businesses or projects can use the WordPress name and logo to refer to and explain their services, but they cannot use them as part of a product , project, service , domain name, or company name and they cannot use them in any way that suggests an affiliation with or endorsement by the WordPress Foundation or the WordPress open source project. At https://wpengine.com/…

Thats covered by Nominative Fair Use. It's the same body of law that allows a repair shop to advertise that they are a "Volkswagen Repair Shop" (as long as there is no implication that they are officially endorsed by the car company).

Attempt to sell a product titled “Essential Disney®” or a service titled “Enterprise Outlook®” and it’s not going to go well for you.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#225

Post by bdzr »

Does anyone know why WP engine doesn't actually support multiple post revisions by default? I worked with WordPress significantly quite a while ago and found it to be an absolute dumpster fire of a codebase. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if running a scalable WP host required tamping down on some things.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#226

Post by imiric »

supermatt wrote: post #191

WP Engine calls itself the worlds #1 wordpress hosting (with over 1.5m clients), but they aren't even in the top 10 material contributors to wordpress. Although they have pledged to support wordpress development, is is only to the tune of 40 hours a week. Their pledge is miniscule given their usage of wordpress and isn't even in the top 25 pledges made. It seems they were called out on this, and told to resolve it or…

Nice try, Matt.

In all seriousness, if this whole thing is about some false marketing claim from WPE, then call them out specifically on that in a tweet or something. Why does it deserve the "scorched earth nuclear approach", which equates to blackmailing them into giving you millions to prevent you from disparaging them in all media outlets? The claims Matt made go far beyond WPE not contributing to WP development as much as they say they do.

This corporate mudslinging paints WP.com in a much worse light than WPE. IANAL but I think there's a case here for a defamation lawsuit at the very least, if not for outright blackmailing.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#227

Post by chuckadams »

tptacek wrote: post #204
mthoms wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notably, Matt demanded that would need to be paid to Automattic instead of the WordPress Foundation. (that's according to WPEngine). Automattic is Matt's private, for-profit company and a direct competitor to WPE.

There are things in that WPE C&D that make me question how candid they're being; for instance, the trademark dispute seems an awful lot more complicated than the letters "W" and "P".

Perhaps, but as I mentioned elsewhere, MM is putting on a master class on how not to resolve such disputes.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#228

Post by slouch »

mthoms wrote: post #201
slouch wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt admitted on reddit that he asked for 8% of annual revenue or ~40 million. https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fnz0h6/comment/... He posted this after receiving the C&D.

Notably, Matt demanded that would need to be paid to Automattic instead of the WordPress Foundation. (that's according to WPEngine). Automattic is Matt's private, for-profit company and a direct competitor to WPE.

That's because Matt's Foundation gave Matt's Automattic the exclusive commercial trademark license. https://x.com/photomatt/status/1838671002529665394

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#229

Post by etchalon »

bdzr wrote: post #225

Does anyone know why WP engine doesn't actually support multiple post revisions by default? I worked with WordPress significantly quite a while ago and found it to be an absolute dumpster fire of a codebase. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if running a scalable WP host required tamping down on some things.

Revisions significantly bloat the size of the primary table (wp_posts) and secondary meta tables. Because WordPress's database architecture is hilariously simple and under-engineered, that bloat ends up slowing down every query.

So, to keep WordPress performant, you either need to regular prune wp_posts, or you need a continually beefier database instance to handle the installation.

Sane DevOps teams just limit revisions to something like "last 5" to keep things under control.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#230

Post by bastawhiz »

keane wrote: post #43
muglug wrote: post #20

Sad to see Matt M behaving in such a childish manner. The initial wordpress.org blogpost looked pretty bad, but the quoted text messages are so much worse.

It's not uncommon for a license being required to use a registered trademark. WPE denies they need one. Matt apparently disagrees.

If this is indeed true, that ship has sailed. WP Engine was founded nearly fifteen years ago. You need to enforce your trademark for it to be valid: you don't get to decide fourteen years later that you're actually not happy about it.
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