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Today I ran across an interesting discussion happening over at one of my favorite WordPress blogs, WPCandy, that I figured I would mention over here.
The discussion is regarding trademarking, and the use of “WordPress” in your domain URL. Obviously this domain uses WordPress in the URL, so I have both a fan interest and a financial interest in the discussion.
First, here is some information from Michael’s post:
According to WordPress.org, to protect their trademark they ask that if you are going to create a WordPress related site not to use “WordPress” in the domain you choose.
What’s the meaning behind this? Are sites that use WordPress in their name at risk? Is WPCandy at risk?
Although they are not lawyers, WordPress still insists that they must make it clear, “so that we protect our trademark.”
In addition to running this website and Slickmania, I also spend a lot of my spare time as an active “domainer”, meaning that I buy/sell/park domains both to generate extra income and invest in my online future. One of the things you learn very early when you buy and sell domains is trademarking and what domains are off limits. When you purchase a domain that includes the name of a trademarked product, the company that owns the trademark can pull take it from you. I’ve also found that it helps being married to an attorney when I look into buying a domain that could potentially violate an existing trademark.
With this knowledge in hand, when I originally purchased the domain Hack WordPress, I was well aware of the potential risk involved with such a decision. As a result, in addition to purchasing this domain, I chose to acquire a few other alternate domains which I keep in my domain portfolio in case I should ever have to move this website to a new domain. These alternate domains use “wp” instead of WordPress, which I don’t believe would be covered under the trademark mentioned above.
With that said, I find it very unlikely that WordPress would ever invest the time or money involved in “shutting down” or turning over domains that use WordPress in the URL unless the sites were somehow trying to harm WordPress in some way. After all, this product is built upon open source and the WordPress community! I believe that WordPress fan sites do a lot to help the software and the community that supports the software, so it would not be in their best interests to remove them. I believe this statement is more a legal matter to protect them in situations where they would need to enforce this.
The only thing I worry about is a major corporation such as Google/Yahoo/Microsoft acquiring WordPress, because they have been known to pursue fan sites violating trademarks.
What is your take on this issue?
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