More trademark things today. Lorelle on WordPress has a nice post on Automattics’€™ new domain name policy. This is from WordPress.org:
For various reasons related to our WordPress trademark, we ask if you’re going to start a site about WordPress or related to it that you not use “WordPress” in the domain name. We’re not lawyers, but very good ones tell us we have to do this to preserve our trademark.
More over at Lorelle’€™s.
Author: Thord Daniel Hedengren
Thord Daniel Hedengren is a designer, writer, and blogger, and also the former editor of The Blog Herald. He used to be a hotshot in the gaming industry in Sweden, but sold everything and went International. Most recently he wrote a book called Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog, and does loads of kickass design.
As far as I have seen in the conversations, there is nothing new about this policy.
First of all the policy it pretty well hidden
The sites currently being persued are long term, high profile sites that do not compete with “downloadable software”, which is the market segment of the pending trademark registration.
They are also strong supporters of WordPress, especially in the business community.
There is a lot of highly topical discussion over on my blog atm, it is very civilized.
http://andybeard.eu/2006/10/wordpress-trademark-scammers.html