[bigiain]

Yeah. I foresee a possible hilarious outcome here.

Matt wins this case, having the court determine the trademarks are "worth" so much that WPEngine - one out of thousands of WP hosting companies - owes licence fees of 10mil per year. Lets ballpark that at a billion dollar a year in licence fees worth of revenue, maybe 5 or 10 billion value.

The IRS then steps in and "Al Capones" Matt and Automattic for tax evasion by moving billions of dollars of assets between a non profit and a for profit company without disclosing or paying tax on it. IRS wins punitive damages, wipes out every company asset Matt's ever been involved with.

WPEngine and Silver Lake buy the remains of these companies (including the trademarks) at fire sale prices.

Everybody loses.

[kstrauser]

Whoa. I’m bookmarking this for later. That seems way too plausible to my not-a-lawyer ears.

[busterarm]

WPEngine isn't just one out of thousands of WP hosting companies. They're an absolute juggernaut dwarfing everyone else.

It's like saying AWS is one of dozens of cloud providers. The sad thing is that there are FAR BETTER WP hosting services out there, like Pantheon.io, and the majority of the WordPress community does not even know that they exist.

[anon7000]

I think it was explained elsewhere, but Automattic has the commercial trademark rights, so licensing money wouldn’t be transferred to a non-profit foundation.

[bigiain]

Yeah, but according to the filing, Matt had Automattic transfer the ownership of the trademarks to the foundation, they had the foundation grant the exclusive licence back to Automattic.

If those trademarks are asserted to be worth billions, there are presumably reporting and tax obligations for both the ownership transfer and the licence grant agreement.

[metamichael]

WordPress Foundation: Owns the trademark

Automattic: Owns the commercial right to use and sell the license

This is done because the WordPress Foundation is non-profit. The legal intricacies of this have been worked out a long time ago. You want to use the WordPress license? Then you'll have to buy it from Automattic.

[re-thc]

> The legal intricacies of this have been worked out a long time ago.

Doesn't sound like. Most people are still confused.