this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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Yeah, open source licenses don't entitle you to use trademarks.
This looks pretty bad to me.
WP Engine for WordPress.
That seems to be the commonly accepted solution if you look at other 3rd party trademark cases - situations like "RIF is fun for Reddit" coming to mind.
RIF did have to change their name though. https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/el8ri3/reddit_is_fun_is_being_renamed_to_rif_is_fun_for/
Yes, because it used to be"Reddit is Fun", which wasn't okay. That was the point.
Wordoress engine for wordpress ?
Reddit is fun is fun for Reddit. The WP is just WP, just like RIF is just RIF.
So, a fig leaf trademark that banks on the confusion and they make millions of that legitimacy, millions that these middle man kick about 200k upstream for ?
I don't see how RIF could potentially confuse anyone at all. WP Engine, maybe, but I'm not convinced. I mean, the US trademark office did allow the latter to be trademarked.
It's an interesting parallel that ultimately RIF was kicked off the platform and the trademark issue in 2020 was just the prelude to the the hostility and removal from the platform and not the real core issue, which profit extraction from the captive audience of these platform
Like JohnEdwa said, using a trademark to refer to someone else's product is considered nominative fair use: "referencing a mark to identify the actual goods and services that the trademark holder identifies with the mark."
They're very obviously using the trademark in a manner that implies endorsement.
That is absolutely trademark infringement.
At most, they just ambiguously used "Powered by WordPress Experts" once. I don't see how the evidence misleads people into thinking there was an endorsement.
IMO, dumb people confuse stuff all the time, like the Minecraft Gamepedia with the Minecraft Wikia back then. The meager amount of evidence presented does not convince me that WP Engine has done any actual harm to the WordPress brand.
But yeah, the smart way out would've been adding a "WP Engine is not associated with WordPress.org", at least one below the "WP ENGINE®, VELOCITIZE®, TORQUE®, EVERCACHE®, and the cog logo service marks are owned by WPEngine, Inc." footer. All in the past now, though. At the best both companies are tomfools.
They explicitly call their engine Wordpress more than once in those examples. You cannot do that.
Yes they can. It’s actually WordPress, so it’s nominative.
No, they can't, because no, it isn't. That's what trademarks are for. You can't use a trademarked name to refer to your competing product.
Open source projects are generally permissive in terms of people repackaging their code for distribution for different platforms within reasonable guidelines, but even that is a sufficient change that they aren't obligated to allow their trademarks to be used that way.
It is no longer Wordpress once it's modified. That's what trademark is for.
I think we should agree to disagree that it was modified enough here.
There is no "enough". Any modification at all takes their permission to use their trademark.
Most allow you to do so within reasonable guidelines, but that only gives you the benefit of the doubt if it's ambiguous. As soon as they tell you that you don't have permission to use their trademark on your altered version, you can't use it.
But is gatekeeping the configuration files or wrapping around the software really modification?
I can't go and modify something and violate their trademarks in the process lol.
You can't, and I'm disagreeing that what they were doing counts as modification.
Did they change anything? If so, it's modification.
That is the question. I think this is all perfectly achievable by only writing new, separate software to selectively gatekeep the configuration files without changing the source code of WordPress itself. Like I said, not dedicating more resources to WordPress.org doesn't give WP Engine the moral high ground either, though.
To be honest it doesn't really matter if it's modified or an entirely different product offering. It seems it is trying to muddy the waters with the name WP.
IMO that part's entirely fine. After all, it is a webhosting engine for WordPress. Would you say the same about e.g. NameMC.com?