If they do, it needs to identified all the time on their website.

Go to IBM and you'll see a (r) after it.

Go to Xerox and you'll see a (r) after it.

Go to Dell and you'll see a (tm) after it.

Good luck fighting a tradedress infringement when you don't even identify WordPress as (tm) anywhere on your site when you must...whenever you use WordPress.

On one of my sites I'm licensed to sell an item that is (r) by a Fortune 500 company. Every page on my site must have an (r) after every use of their registered trademark, plus I have to have a disclaimer on every page where it's used (at the bottom) identifying the owner of the trademark.

Good luck to WordPress bringing on any lawsuit. If I was on the receiving end of one of their lawyer's letters I'd be laughin' my azz off.

Amen Bruthaaa!!!!!!

I made some huge mistakes, and completely rewrote the blog post -- and deleted the old one. I sincerely apologize for any perceived slight, including statements that may have seemed defamatory, which was the very point I was against in my original post.

Here it is:

The Michel Fortin Blog » Blog Archive » WordPress, Trademarks And Apologies

Michael,

Good thing you revised it. On a personal blog, it would have been fair game. In a *professional* blog context it was factually a bit iffy. It set of my alarm.

WordPress has taken it to a whole new level, now...

"Is Wordpress the fabled Blog Police after all?" from The Intuitive Life Business Blog

This is baffling.

Sheesh. Sounds like they are shooting themselves in the foot!

Hot news!

Sherman changed the look of his site to a more Web 2.0 feel. In fact, he wanted to appeal to a more corporate crowd for a while now, and started doing working on the new design way before the whole trademark fiasco.

Thing is, this event has precipitated its acceleration. (And officially, as of just moments ago, Sherman got the green light from Wordpress.)

Check it out...

Wordpress Tutorials - Blogging Tutorials - Video Training Series

Hey thanks for posting that Michel.

I'm really excited to check out his site and understand
the changes he made, as I'm building some sites myself
that I want to incorporate a more web 2.0 and Google
PPC friendly design.

I have to wonder about this though as I spent a bit of
time just figuring out how to order Sherman's product.

Obviously that had a lot to do with my insanely short
attention span, but if I couldn't find the order button
then I'm sure there is at least another guy somewhere
in the world as slow as I.

Anyways, thanks again. I'm very curious to know how
this works out for him.

I guess the best way to know would be to sign up as
an affiliate and shove it a bunch of traffic.

I think that will be my plan of attack.

Now double thanks Michel, cuz this thread just gave me a
great way to test whether or not his site design is
working, while making both of us some money in the
same time (hopefully)!

I love it when ideas pop into the head when I have
the keyboard in front of me.

I'm off to sign up as an affiliate.

Michael...

Cheers to the author's revision of that Wordpress tutorial site.

It has great copy, nice design style, and multi-pitch targeting of non-bloggers, new bloggers, and experienced bloggers alike.

It gives the feel of respecting my intelligence. It's straight-up about free alternatives are out there, but humourously highlights why I should save my valuable time by going with what it has to offer...

Cool and classy!

This is not a salesletter, but listen to this guy...

PPC Management - pepperjamSEARCH

And this is a "web 2.0-ish" company. Corporate. Big name clients. Etc.

Yup, Brian Clark was right. It's all in the presentation.