🤔 Matt Mullenweg vs. WPEngine [Part 4]  ## Metadata - Author: [[Chris Pearson]] - Full Title: 🤔 Matt Mullenweg vs. WPEngine [Part 4] - Category: #articles - Document Note: Short Summary for [🤔 Matt Mullenweg vs. WPEngine [Part 4]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w) by [Merlin](https://merlin.foyer.work/) Title: "WordPress Trademark Dispute: Automatic vs. WP Engine - Unlicensed Use & Control Issues" [00:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=3) Automatic, Mullenweg, and WooCommerce have exclusive commercial rights from WordPress Foundation for using the WordPress trademark. [02:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=147) Discussion on legal vs. moral aspects in a business context [04:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=284) Incentive structures drive behavior and should not be judged the same [06:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=418) Implementing a headless approach for WordPress customization. [08:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=523) WP Engine's business model built on using client's trademarks to mislead consumers [10:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=656) WP Engine's infringement and confusion about affiliation [13:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=781) Issue regarding intellectual property misuse and trademark policy violations [15:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=907) Legal implications of trademarks and royalties in WordPress sphere. [17:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=1021) WP Engine accused of misusing trademark with claims of 'headless WordPress' [18:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=1131) Debate on WordPress technical expertise --------------------------------- Detailed Summary for [🤔 Matt Mullenweg vs. WPEngine [Part 4]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w) by [Merlin](https://merlin.foyer.work/) Title: "WordPress Trademark Dispute: Automatic vs. WP Engine - Unlicensed Use & Control Issues" [00:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=3) Automatic, Mullenweg, and WooCommerce have exclusive commercial rights from WordPress Foundation for using the WordPress trademark. - This suggests that there is an effort to exert more control over the use of the word 'WordPress' in commerce. - WP Engine's unlicensed use of the trademarks has infringed the rights and confused customers, leading them to believe WP Engine is associated with the client. [02:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=147) Discussion on legal vs. moral aspects in a business context - Exploration of the ethical implications of legal actions in business decisions - Comparison between legal exoneration and moral discernment in business behavior [04:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=284) Incentive structures drive behavior and should not be judged the same - Incentivizes Automatic to contribute to the core - Development of satellite components in relation to core improvements [06:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=418) Implementing a headless approach for WordPress customization. - Matt Mullenweg chose a headless approach to streamline and customize WordPress by removing PHP admin layers, allowing a JavaScript layer to interact with the database. - Automatic benefits from seamless integration with WordPress core, making implementation easier compared to other developers. [08:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=523) WP Engine's business model built on using client's trademarks to mislead consumers - Matt Mullenweg is concerned about the implications for the WordPress community and the company's revenue generation - Challenges arise due to the unauthorized use of client's trademarks in the marketplace for many years [10:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=656) WP Engine's infringement and confusion about affiliation - Consumers are confused on whether WP Engine is affiliated with WordPress - Concerns about consumer confusion are unfounded, real confusion lies within the architecture of WordPress [13:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=781) Issue regarding intellectual property misuse and trademark policy violations - WordPress Foundation trademark policy's prohibition on use of WordPress marks discussed. - Noteworthy impact on various companies such as Pig Ley in terms of trademark usage. [15:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=907) Legal implications of trademarks and royalties in WordPress sphere. - This kind of legal action may have far-reaching implications and could set a precedent. - WPEngine is seeking an 8% ongoing royalty which could disrupt the software world. [17:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=1021) WP Engine accused of misusing trademark with claims of 'headless WordPress' - Headless WordPress and WooCommerce are discussed as new points of contention - Doubts raised about claims of fastest WordPress hosting and fully managed WordPress hosting [18:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w&t=1131) Debate on WordPress technical expertise - WordPress technical experts are self-styled due to open-source nature of WordPress.org - The lines between self-styled experts and WP Engine's offering seem arbitrary - Summary: Automattic's cease & desist letter to WPEngine Matt has a stronger position than you probably think, even if he's pissed a lot of people off in the process. - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDi-KI15o9w all right gang it's time to get the other side of the story now we're going to look at automatics cease and toist letter to WP engine all right let's dive in uh so looking at the highlighted stuff here it says uh the exclusive commercial rights uh from the WordPress Foundation to use enforce and sublicense the word the world famous WordPress trademark among others and all associate in intellectual property rights so this says that automatic Mullen WG and woo Commerce as one entity the client they own the exclusive commercial rights from the WordPress Foundation WordPress Foundation owns it and then grants the exclusive commercial rights to use the WordPress trademark to automatic and woo Commerce now this is an interesting way to set up the whole thing because in 2010 and 2011 when this stuff was first hashed out like this is you know version one of this kind of thing it was said that WP could could be used in domain names WordPress could not be used in domain names and you had to to say like something for WordPress right not like WordPress something because then it could be construed that that item is an official thing of Wordpress or a part of it uh so that's kind of interesting and there are some gray areas here that are going to come up as we go through this uh to to so to me this feels like a new slant on an old claim and I think this is the gotcha many people are missing so far myself included but uh WordPress is you know mullenweg is setting things up to you know exert a little bit more of iron fisted control over the use of the word WordPress in Commerce that's what it looks like to me of course I'm not a lawyer uh all right so this uh moving on we understand that our client has contacted you about securing a proper license to use its trademarks yet no such agreement has been reached as such you're blatant and widespread unlicensed use of our clients trademarks has infringed our clients rights and Confused customers into believing falsely that WP engine is authorized endorsed or sponsored by or otherwise Affiliated or associated with our client so it's the confusion angle again around concerning the use of the word word press um like I said this is a new argument on an old topic a new it's slightly different angle here and it's um honestly after reading this I feel like uh mull has a stronger position I don't like it I think this is a rug pool big time Big Time rug pool let's get that out there right away uh this is uncool but um this is just a reality you have to deal with as you as you as you grow up it's too bad but like many many unsavory things are upheld in court right and so I've always used this this uh sort of Uris to judge these things legally certain things might be okay but like morally and just internally to us as people some of them feel really icky and awful like yeah okay the court said you're good buddy but like you're gross and people want nothing to do with that that kind of negative energy so I think this is one of those situations fam where Matt is probably going to be exonerated legally but at what cost I mean like I get he obviously doesn't care a lot of money on the line here whatever but um legal cover for shittiness just doesn't sit well with me Fam you certainly don't get a pass from me just cuz some Court said you're okay all right moving through the document it says here so they're whining that WP engine claims to contribute 40 hours a week to the development of Wordpress core and then they say here by contrast automatic is contributing almost 4,000 hours per week to Wordpress as if this um this contrast they're setting up means anything at all let's unpack what's behind that contrast and I think you'll see it a lot differently than this you know couple orders of magnitude thing that they're trying to site here first of all the WordPress Foundation is controlled by Matt mullenweg it owns all the the trademarks and all this stuff the WordPress Foundation which he controls has miraculously granted exclusive commercial use for those trademarks I mentioned woo Commerce woo and WordPress they've granted those exclusive rights to Matt mum leg and automatic and also to woo Commerce Inc which is I guess a separate company but under the heading um so given that structure automatic has a much higher incentive to contribute to the core than WP engine which derives no benefit and exercises no control over any of this stuff it's just a completely different incentive structure incentives Drive Behavior if your incentives aren't the same then the behaviors aren't going to be the same and they shouldn't be judged the same it's complete completely ridiculous my goodness but there's more to this exact thing when I develop so I have an engine for all of my software okay so like if I release a new piece of software it's still going to use this main engine I built many years ago and I I add in new stuff to the engine and then I have these uh satellite components and those do very interesting unique things and the satellite components are stuff I sell these days but the engine drives it all anyway it's it's been I've been using this for 15 years okay so when I want to introduce some new feature to one of my satellite pieces of software it's quite often the case that I will go back have to go back to my main engine the core and modify it I need to improve it in some way add some feature or some capability and then I can go out to my satellite component and add the new feature there and it all just works so in order for me to continue develop my ecosystem and and you know keep pushing out under my Frontier I often have to return to my core and fix it or improve it but that directly feeds the stuff I'm able to do automatic works in the same way they run wordpress.com they run all kinds of other stuff any changes that they make to Wordpress are are are usually directly related to them being able to do something better in their own business models the entire existence of Gutenberg rests on this premise they want they it would be better for automatic if they could just abandon the WordPress admin it's kind of holding them back if they want to do this impressible their hosting company if they want to like roll out a version of Wordpress that stripped down and easier for customers the easiest way for Matt to do this with the least amount of strrip is to uh well one one of the ways there's multiple ways it could have been done but he chose to do take this headless approach to where you just you you cannibalize the WordPress database you get rid of all the the PHP admin layers so you're not like going into the WordPress admin you keep the database and then you have this JavaScript layer that then interacts with the database and you can have a whole new admin you can have a whole new everything that's based on this JavaScript layer and that's what automatic is doing that's why the the the Gutenberg block editors all JavaScript stuff all this is like phase one of that total headless plan where he can you know he can still have WordPress but he gets to run things his way I mean I don't fault him for this at all I I want to make this totally clear I just said this is how I run my software business you got to update the core to do all the other stuff but Matt has a problem that I don't he has Legacy concerns and all those compatibility concerns with the WordPress core so he's really Limited in what he can do so if he wants to uh you know make some changes that help him to B to to do big business he has to you know go a little farther and do take some options that I think are unsaver that's why the Gutenberg thing's kind of been a flop but the bottom line is that 4,000 hours versus 40 hours a week is a joke you should just read it as a joke uh automatic benefits directly from the changes they're able to make to core and then they immediately Implement that stuff in their business practices it's like they know they need to get to step two but in order to get to step two step one has to be added to Wordpress core there is zero friction between automatic and the WordPress core they can just add this there's way less pain for them than there is for other developers in terms of adding things to Wordpress core and then boom once that's in there they can expand their own private business model via automatic okay so that apples to orang as crap like get out of here with this if you're buying that you're just dumb uh here we go and he says instead WP engine's entire business model is predicated on using our clients trademarks particularly WordPress woocommerce and woo to mislead consumers into believing there's an association between WP engine and automatic I going to pull up exhibit B to show you some of this at the end of this video like I said uh in the in the first segment this is to me it feels like a new approach at attacking the WordPress trademark and I think they've got a little bit of a foothold here and I don't like it the implications for the community are terrible but uh that's where we are just being realistic here okay moving on on information and belief WP engine has developed a business generating annual revenues of over 400 million I'm beginning to think this really matters to Matt he hates this we can speculate why later uh which has been based entirely on extensive and unauthorized uses of our clients trademarks I hate absurd absolutes I effing hate them based entirely on extensive and unauthorized uses of our clients trademarks I'm going to call the biggest I can possibly call this has not been a problem for 14 years mullenweg gave WP engine startup capital and his Blessing to use the name WP engine managed WordPress hosting has evidently been an acceptable phrasing in the marketplace for many years I would wager to say almost a decade if not more it's never been a problem when anyone else has done it why is it now there's a company called kinsta that offers manag WordPress hosting there's a company called uh pressible which is a subsidiary of automatic something like this they offer manage WordPress hosting I got to figure you know if if if this is played out to the maximum extent possible the kinas and WP engins of the world are going to have to drop that verbiage and will no longer be able to use things like manage WordPress hosting or WordPress hosting and pressel's uh big idea is that you know might be a little bit of a Kur fluffle now but as time goes by they'll be the sole place that people will go to for this managed WordPress hosting I guess I think it's a cash grab at the end of the day everything is right all right moving on unsurprisingly WP engines infringing commercial use of our clients trademarks have created consumer confusion as to whether WP engine is affiliated with our client including many references to WP engine being WordPress engine so first of all that's just confuse consumers saying WordPress engine second of all and not confuse consumers in the sense that they are confused about who owns what or who's in charge of what they see WP they say WordPress I I made that mistake in a couple of videos I made the last couple days I see WP sometimes I say WordPress sometimes I'll say WP it's not like an intentional thing it's just when you've repeated something 110 billion times over the years these things happen and not only that this I hate this is concern trolling this is third-party victim BS concern trolling have created consumer confusion well show me these examples show me these examples these Boomer grandmas being confused about this nobody is freaking confused about this buddy nobody is confused people are confused about the fact that WordPress doesn't really seem to exist as a single thing there's wordpress.org there's wordpress.com there's posts there's pages in the actual architecture of Wordpress these are effed up points of confusion they should have been ironed out long ago they weren't Matt's got to understand there is so much baked into confusion to Wordpress it's of course there's confusion and you did it buddy you did it you know what let's return to the posts and Pages thing did you know there is no difference between a post and a page it's just a page on your damn website a page is the most fundamental concept on the internet the only difference between a post and a page is that post has a blogging context and more specifically a post is automatically syndicated to something called an RSS feed that sadly nobody uses anymore and and there is a chronological component a chronological uh trait to each post other than that like a chronological order like this post came before that one other than that there's no difference between posts and Pages no difference at all so that is another point of Bas level confusion introduced by WordPress for many years so them whining about confusion it's just it's just false so all right next page clients intellectual property misuse has led to unjust enrichments and undo profits okay now it's a problem it was not a problem from 2010 through uh at least February 2024 the First time i' seen a post from Matt talking about anything like this uh so it was fine for like 14 years and now it's not fine okay got it obviously something changed something upset him uh let's see you repeatedly and intentionally violated the WordPress Foundation trademark policy's prohibition on use of the WordPress marks as part of a product project service domain name or company name as demonstrated in exhibit B attached here to again I'm going to go through exhibit B in just a moment this is crazy this is going to affect a ton of companies a ton of companies I Pig Ley is another hosting company that I think fashion themselves as a managed WordPress hosting company I haven't done a review of these companies in the last like you know last week um but I I'm curious now to go through them and see which ones have already started to scramble and change their verbage I guarantee you it's happening it's such a such rat Behavior but um I just don't like this scrambling to appease Matt especially when he's acting all unhinged no all right so here's what mullenweg wants WP engine to do they want to remove any use of the trademarks from you know their their products Services whatever uh remove and Destroy any advertisements that use the trademarks provide an accounting of all profits from the service offerings that have made unauthorized use of our clients's intellectual property do you guys understand that this is revisionist history they're going back through and saying even though we didn't say anything and it was totally fine for 14 years now it's not you need to go back and do a full accounting and and you're going to have to pay up for that this as crazy as this is this kind of thing may end up getting upheld in court but is it right like what kind of signal is this sending everyone else who operates in the WordPress sphere they're all going to shut close up shop tomorrow Matt's going to be the only one left standing but the um the the uh good willll or bad will if you will out in the e system is going to be so bad that I don't think he's going to be able to build some some massive unicorn company off of this um you know it it it I think it's a big bet it's a a big gamble but like if you win through a peric victory like this like this scorched Earth policy and then all these people have to come scrambling back to you and beg for a handout like how's that GNA feel doesn't this matter like I can't look away from that I guess if you got enough money coming in maybe people can or if you feel like you're just like you know you're a superhuman and everyone else is beneath you like screw the rats who cares but man I I don't know victory at what cost I I sorry fam I don't think it's worth it and I can't see around my head let's see oh and they want okay the final point is they want them to pay up they want them to determine what the damages are and then to pay up and I said in an earlier video that they wanted 5 % they want an 8% royalty on an ongoing basis that is a tax so they're saying I I guess I you know I guess the claim here is if you use the trademarks then you're going to have to pay a tax and uh I don't see you know I don't see how this could ever be upheld just because of the far-reaching implications of such a thing I think it would just turn the whole software world upside down so I don't see how that could be upheld but we live in clown world so like you never know ripping through exhibit B here the first one that it might be cut off at the top I don't know if you can see it but it says headless WordPress so that is a new one and I think it's interesting that that's the first thing they put in their exhibit B to show that WP engine is misusing the trademark uh just because I know manage WordPress hosting has has been around in Commerce for like a decade at least uh headless WordPress is a little bit newer and I think more closely associated with what automatic has been trying to do so it's interesting they lead with that cuz that that feels like one they could could actually crack but it's the other ones I mentioned that are a little more dubious here's another one increase website speed with the fastest WordPress hosting but see this is where it's so murky again I mentioned the wordpress.org wordpress.com like people aren't even clear on what WordPress is and that's just dealing with WordPress and Associated properties so WordPress hosting like how else are you supposed to say this you can't host a wordpress.com site elsewhere wordpress.org is literally intended to be distributed to different servers which implies different hosts are going to be necessary should those hosts not be able to say that like they're ready and and and positioned to accommodate WordPress websites it's just it's not feeling too good here's another one a fully managed WordPress hosting service like I said this kind of verbiage has been in use for a long time it's never been a problem until now here's another one the path to woocomerce success starts here I'm not aware of any previous claims about the use of woo Commerce so this feels a lot like the Headless WordPress and woo Commerce these feel like two new angles that they'll at least be able to get some some uh Clarity on those and we probably uh be able to slap down anyone who uses them but like for what for what and then last in exhibit B but certainly not least WordPress technical experts at your service again wordpress. org is intended to be distributed software it is open source and it is therefore implied that any experts are self- styled there is no governing body there is no appointing body that says like okay well this person is accredited as a WordPress technical expert this has always been the case Freelancers have fashion themselves this way for as long as I can remember like 18 years plus a WordPress expert I don't see how that's any different from a WordPress technical expert and so why if Freelancers and stuff are able to Fashion themselves in this way why is it not okay for WP engine to say something like this in an offering for an upsale service or upsale type service when I know the reality of building websites is people like oh I want to do this and like oh crap I can't do this I tried to hire somebody I don't know what I'm doing maybe I'll get actual legitimate organized help from somebody like WP engine I'm not defending the practice per se but I'm just saying it's weird when that's been the case so like where do you draw these lines they seem very arbitrary to me, 🤔 Matt Mullenweg vs. WPEngine [Part 4], Chris Pearson, 01j8wknpv7zj2wq91kpak9n08e.