WordPress, Trademarks And Apologies

Recently, I made a mistake.

I want to pub­licly and sin­cerely apol­o­gize to Matt Mul­len­weg, lead devel­oper at Word­Press, for cre­at­ing any mis­per­cep­tion, post­ing mis­lead­ing infor­ma­tion or mak­ing state­ments that may be per­ceived as defam­a­tory — the very thing I was object­ing to in my post in the first place.

It was far from my intent.

My post seems to not only have pinched a nerve, but also as more and more com­ments poured in, I reread my post sev­eral times and saw that my points were either poten­tially wrongly com­mu­ni­cated. So let me offi­cially clar­ify. First, the story:

Sher­man Hu is not only a friend, but he’s also a fine mar­keter, a savvy busi­ness­man and the cre­ator of Word​pressTu​to​ri​als​.com. And I love what he’s done.

He offers hun­dreds (yes, hun­dreds!) of videos, tons of arti­cles and a cool com­mu­nity of peo­ple who want to learn how to make the best use of their Word­Press blogs. Com­mer­cial or not.

I’m also a mem­ber of his site, and his videos have helped me greatly. And I highly rec­om­mend them. But appar­ently, Word­Press doesn’t.

The folks over at Word­Press have sent Sher­man a cease and desist let­ter, ask­ing him to change his domain name as it was a vio­la­tion of Word­Press’ trade­mark by using the word “Word­Press” in it.

I’m far from being an intel­lec­tual prop­erty lawyer, but the premise of it all seems to be to pro­tect Word­Press’ brand, good name and image. Matt stated that the pur­pose was to remove any per­ceived asso­ci­a­tion or endorse­ment of sites he con­sid­ers “scammy.”

(And a web­site with the same name in its domain can indeed be eas­ily seen as an endorse­ment or in asso­ci­a­tion with the other.)

I absolutely love Word­Press. It’s the best blog­ging plat­form I’ve ever used, and I rec­om­mend it highly. And I love Sherman’s videos, too. They’re absolutely fan­tas­tic, and they’ve helped me out a few times to cus­tomize my own blog.

And I’m all for Matt and his team attempt­ing to pro­tect their rights.

But some­thing about this whole sit­u­a­tion frus­trates me some­what. The story is a lit­tle com­pli­cated and talked about on sev­eral blogs.

But the I issue I have is with the approach Word­Press took.

Some argue that the trade­mark in this spe­cific case pro­tects the soft­ware or the name of the busi­ness, but not train­ing mate­ri­als. And oth­ers argue that Word­Press is open source, and there­fore falls under a dif­fer­ent jurispru­dence. (Or “fair use.”)

Again, I’m not a lawyer. And that is arguable on many lev­els, and falls in a cat­e­gory I’m def­i­nitely not well-​​versed in. But the issue, here, is not about trade­marks per se. It’s about some­thing else.

First of all, I can see why Matt is doing this.

He’s try­ing to pro­tect the value of the Word­Press brand and, accord­ing to Matt, “stop scammy and snake oil” sites. That’s com­mend­able. Espe­cially since Word­Press is open source and such an awe­some blog­ging soft­ware that can be mis­used and abused by a few unscrupu­lous people.

Clamp­ing down on scam­mers is one thing. (Good­ness knows the Inter­net is filled with scam­mers, spam­mers and snake oils, includ­ing some of them sell­ing uneth­i­cal uses of WordPress.)

But to clamp down on a site that sells tuto­ri­als is another. And up until recently, only two tuto­r­ial sites have received notices — and not the very scam sites they are tar­get­ing in the first place.

That may or may not be a point of con­tention, and I don’t nec­es­sar­ily agree with that tac­tic. But I’m sure there are ample rea­sons Matt and WP have done so.

What makes me ques­tion this sit­u­a­tion is the approach they took along with side com­ments they made on other blogs.

For exam­ple, accord­ing to Michael Campbell’s blog, WP is quoted to have said that they find “affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing dis­taste­ful.” On other blogs, Matt has said that the two sites in ques­tion were tar­geted sim­ply because they “look scammy.”

That’s a strong state­ment. But what’s even stronger is the fact that Sher­man is said to be “tak­ing advan­tage of a lack of good doc­u­men­ta­tion in Open Source com­mu­nity soft­ware.” This infers abuse. And I don’t par­tic­u­larly agree with that.

Sher­man is a respectable indi­vid­ual. By the same token, I com­mend Word­Press for pro­tect­ing their rights. But to enforce those rights on web­sites that use a trade­mark sim­ply because, appar­ently, they appear “scammy” is not a great move. And can eas­ily be misconstrued.

I don’t think what WP did was wrong. But I don’t agree the man­ner in which it was done. That’s just my opin­ion. But admit­tedly, this seems a lot less ven­omous than Weblogs, Inc.‘s Jason Cala­ca­nis accus­ing PayPer​Post​.com of being a “can­cer” to the blogosphere.

To some who haven’t fol­lowed the story and look at the whole sit­u­a­tion with the lim­ited infor­ma­tion they have (as I have at first), Word​PressTu​to​ri​als​.com is not only tak­ing advan­tage of WP’s lack of doc­u­men­ta­tion but also offer­ing a prod­uct that could even­tu­ally be offered by Word­Press (specif­i­cally the com­pany behind it, Automat­tic), who may want to cash in on the tuto­r­ial mar­ket potential.

Accord­ing to Matt, though, this is not in the cards.

But it’s hard not to come to that con­clu­sion when the only two sites that got slapped since the instal­la­tion of WP’s trade­mark pol­icy (which was sev­eral months ago) are Word​PressTu​to​ri​als​.com and Word​PressVideos​.com — two tuto­r­ial sites. Not soft­ware, not ser­vices and cer­tainly not scams.

(Matt and WP may have indeed gone after other sites since then. But up until recently, this wasn’t the case.)

Per­son­ally, these tuto­r­ial sites are much needed, too, since Word­Press — by their own admis­sion — deeply lacks usable tuto­ri­als or doc­u­men­ta­tion. (Cur­rently, their tuto­ri­als are com­prised of a strictly writ­ten Codex with­out any graph­ics or mul­ti­me­dia, which is pretty hard to nav­i­gate let alone under­stand, and with a lan­guage that can be quite intim­i­dat­ing for the newbie).

That said, there are hun­dreds of sites with the word “Word­Press” in it. And some of them ARE indeed out­right scammy, like comment-​​spamming soft­ware and such.

So, why didn’t they get a notice, too?

Admit­tedly, some­one pointed out to me that there are 167 such domains. Many are owned by Word­Press, oth­ers are com­mu­nity sites, and some of them are poten­tially questionable.

But that doesn’t change the fact that, up until recently, only tuto­r­ial sites got them. And when WP was ques­tioned about this move specif­i­cally on one par­tic­u­lar blog, Matt com­mented they might send a let­ter “to those sites, too.”

As you can see, this makes their approach seem a lit­tle sus­pect. But here’s what really irks me, though. Accord­ing to Camp­bell, the folks at Word­Press said this inter­est­ing tidbit:

“If Sher­man Hu [Word​PressTu​to​ri​als​.com] or Bran­don Hong [Word​PressVideos​.com] had spent their time con­tribut­ing to the Codex or sup­port forums instead of try­ing to sell WP snake oil and tak­ing advan­tage of a lack of good doc­u­men­ta­tion in Open Source com­mu­nity soft­ware, I bet they would have made a lot more hon­est money by now.”

To say that “con­tribut­ing to the Codex” (a tuto­r­ial site to which the pub­lic freely con­tributes) and to the “sup­port forums,” all for free with­out being paid for their spe­cial­ized knowl­edge, will help him make “hon­est” money is a tad presumptuous.

(Con­sid­er­ing that Word­Press’ own tuto­ri­als are hard to under­stand, at least for me — and I’ve been online for over ten years — it is indeed “spe­cial­ized knowl­edge” in my estimation.)

Nev­er­the­less, this can be seen as insult­ing to a lot of people.

Specif­i­cally, it may be insult­ing to direct mar­keters, small busi­nesses, entre­pre­neurs and, yes, copy­writ­ers. Because this state­ment seems to be infer­ring that the prac­tices of legit­i­mate busi­nesses are dishonest.

I com­pletely under­stand that Matt may sim­ply want to stop the use of the trade­mark “Word­Press” on a site to pre­vent what might appear as an endorse­ment. Espe­cially a site that does not reflect WP’s stan­dards or image.

How­ever, some­thing Matt said recently lit a light­bulb in my head. Let me quote Matt directly, who said in com­ment #19 at Andy Beard’s blog:

Whether they are spammy or not, their sites look *exactly* like the peo­ple sell­ing “mass post­ing” to “thou­sands of niche Word­Press and Blogspot blogs” soft­ware, which is spam.

There­fore, Word­Press’ con­tention is the fact that Sher­man Hu’s site uses saleslet­ters. Yes, those very things we copy­writ­ers get paid hand­somely for.

More­over, to pick on two sites of a very spe­cific nature, who are com­pletely dif­fer­ent and far more respectable than the very sites Word­Press claimed they were going after — and by the same token appar­ently ignor­ing other sites that are indeed scams and snake oils — seemed a lit­tle weird to me.

(Am I wrong for feel­ing that way?)

See, up until now, they didn’t go after the ones that were scammy. They went after the ones that “look” scammy. (Specif­i­cally, those that “look sim­i­lar” to scammy sites, since many of them use saleslet­ters, too.)

As a copy­writer for such sites, my aim here is to defend not only Sher­man and his busi­ness model, but copy­writ­ers “of my ilk” who write for them, too. From my van­tage point, it seems to me that busi­nesses tar­geted by WP were those who sported long-​​copy salesletters.

That may or may not be the case. And in Matt’s defense, I orig­i­nally made some mis­lead­ing state­ments, such as con­fus­ing “trade­marks” with “copy­rights,” and mak­ing assump­tions. (For that, I apologize.)

A side­note to all this is, I felt that a free, open-​​source soft­ware would be a lit­tle more flex­i­ble in this area than a large, profit-​​based com­pany like Microsoft who may want to pro­tect its image as it may harm their com­mer­cial value.

But the appear­ance is that Word­Press is sin­gling out a legit­i­mate busi­ness sup­port­ing free, open-​​source soft­ware, which shouldn’t fall in the same cat­e­gory than those who abuse the soft­ware for down­right ille­gal or uneth­i­cal purposes.

That’s just my opin­ion, but I digress.

If Matt is against the use of affil­i­ate mar­keters and long-​​copy saleslet­ters, which “appear scammy” (not only to him but, in his esti­ma­tion, also to oth­ers view­ing the site), this could present a poten­tial prob­lem that Matt felt jus­ti­fied in protecting.

That’s not only accept­able but also com­pletely under­stand­able and com­mend­able. He has every right to do so.

If I were in Matt’s shoes, with the same goals and api­ra­tions as Word­Press, I would have done the same. (But admit­tedly, I would have approached it differently.)

How­ever, whether I agree with him or not on the idea that such sites appear scammy is not the real issue, here.

I made this point NOT because I wanted to sup­port Sher­man as the focal point, although I do. I’ve posted because I’m a copy­writer writ­ing for such seem­ingly “scammy” sites, and this there­fore can be equally per­ceived as peo­ple like me being lumped into the same cat­e­gory — or, like Word­Press, as endors­ing true scams and snake oils.

That’s why I felt such a need to defend it.

For instance, Matt did accuse Sher­man of being a “snake oil” sales­man on another blog. And that’s a fact. A bit harsh, but he’s enti­tled to his opin­ion as I am to mine.

That said, while I agree that I was com­pletely wrong on some counts, I don’t agree with the approach WP took, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing Matt’s ancil­lary com­ments he made on other blogs.

On another sub­ject but related, I cer­tainly don’t agree with Matt and some of the blog com­men­tors who, in sup­port of the open-​​source move­ment, said legit­i­mate busi­nesses who saw an oppor­tu­nity to offer a needed prod­uct as “tak­ing advan­tage” of (i.e., abus­ing) the com­mu­nity, or of being greedy.

To jump into a mar­ket that has a need, and cre­ate a prod­uct that serves it because there is clearly a lack that peo­ple are des­per­ate to have filled, to me is not being greedy at all.

It’s being opportunistic.

Espe­cially when a great, free, open-​​source prod­uct like WP des­per­ately lacks usable doc­u­men­ta­tion and sup­port, and the wait to fill that lack by the open-​​source com­mu­nity can be ago­niz­ingly slow. That’s an oppor­tu­nity wait­ing to taken advan­tage of.

And prof­ited from.

But I under­stand how some peo­ple can erro­neously per­ceive this as being greedy. Espe­cially when real scams, spams and snake oils per­vade the Internet.

But to call a legit­i­mate busi­ness whose profit-​​mindedness moti­vated them to cre­ate a prod­uct that fills that lack (and even sup­ports the soft­ware) as being abu­sive of the open-​​source com­mu­nity is a lit­tle harsh, if not den­i­grat­ing, in my opinion.

Sure, scam­mers are just as oppor­tunis­tic. But Sher­man is not a scam. Far from it. And his busi­ness model is cer­tainly not a fla­grant abuse of open-​​sourcers, either. Say­ing so is going too far, I think.

(And in here I’m refer­ring to com­men­tors on blogs, and not nec­es­sar­ily Matt or WordPress.)

Some peo­ple com­mented that I never read the GPL or GNU licenses. I have, in fact. Because, as busi­ness­peo­ple, my wife Sylvie and I often cre­ate much-​​needed, in-​​demand prod­ucts that peo­ple are will­ing to pay for, and we want to do so with­out step­ping on any toes or ignor­ing the hard work of some bril­liant people.

While many open-​​source projects do allow oth­ers to make money off of them, this is not the case of mak­ing money off of an open-​​source prod­uct in and of itself. It never was.

(In here, as an exam­ple, I’m refer­ring to peo­ple who mod­ify open-​​source soft­ware and repack­age it for resale, such as Word­Press SEO pack­ages and the like, with­out any con­sid­er­a­tion or credit.)

And it’s not even about mak­ing money off a trade­marked name per se. It’s about label­ing those who do make money legit­i­mately as poten­tially being scam­mers, leeches or whatever.

Just to be per­fectly clear, I’m not against Word­Press’ wish to pro­tect their name and their image, as would any sound business.

And I don’t have a prob­lem with some­one say­ing that Word­PressTu­to­ri­als “looks” scammy, either (although I do in a way, but it’s irrel­e­vant here).

And I cer­tainly don’t have a prob­lem with the fact that Word­Press doesn’t want to be seen as an endorse­ment of such sites.

What I have a prob­lem with is the approach taken and the motives behind it based on the side com­ments made about sites that “look scammy” (which to me also includes the copy­writ­ers who write for them).

The approach WP took with­out first check­ing with these sites or offer­ing them an olive branch (such as offer­ing some alter­na­tives if they wish to keep the domain name), can be seen as a bul­ly­ing tactic.

Again, it’s the per­cep­tion and not nec­es­sar­ily true. And maybe they have offered alter­na­tives, but I don’t know that. I can cer­tainly ask Sher­man if this is so, as he is indeed read­ing this blog — as is Matt Mullenweg.

But more impor­tantly, mak­ing blan­ket state­ments (as some peo­ple have) about sites of that nature in the process, and even stat­ing that such sites are “tak­ing advan­tage of Open Source com­mu­nity” and “not mak­ing hon­est money,” is a lit­tle insulting.

I’m not only a copy­writer, I’m also a busi­nessper­son. And yes, I do take offense that some peo­ple accuse peo­ple like me who cre­ate and sell needed prod­ucts related to the open-​​source mar­ket as abu­sive of the community.

In fact, this seems to have turned into an open-​​source vs. for-​​profit debate. I didn’t want that, although I do have my views on it. I think that some open-​​sourcers have elit­ist atti­tudes and do take issues a bit too far, as do some busi­nesses who go too far by greed­ily prof­it­ing from the short­com­ings of oth­ers with­out any regard, credit or consideration.

But ulti­mately, in this par­tic­u­lar case, the point I want to make is that, by stat­ing that cre­at­ing a com­ple­men­tary, sup­port­ive and non-​​competing prod­uct, with­out hav­ing self­lessly con­tributed to its devel­op­ment or sup­port, is abu­sive or dis­hon­est, seems a bit far-​​fetched to me — if not philistine.

Post-​​Scriptum: Some have pointed out that my ini­tial state­ment about the two site own­ers being of Asian descent — which was sim­ply a state­ment of fact and not an opin­ion — seems to have implied racism. I sin­cerely apol­o­gize if peo­ple saw it that way as I cer­tainly didn’t want to cause harm.

After all, I didn’t want to be accused of doing the same thing I objected to in my post, which is to lend to a stereo­type, such as one that all saleslet­ters are scams. Again, it wasn’t my intent to mis­lead or mis­di­rect, and I deeply and sin­cerely apol­o­gize for any per­ceived slight.

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

• How to Capture and Captivate Attention
• The Real Problem With The Flaw of Attraction
• Two Shining Stars in an Age of Darkness
• Changes, Relaunches, and Extreme Makeovers
• Superior Value Equals Superior Sales

Other Related Posts

• The Real Sinister Side of Forced Continuity
• The Four-Book Workweek
• Forced Continuity: A Different Perspective
• What Copy Cosmetics Communicate
• Nothing Can Take The Place of Persistence