Author: Richard Best

Pearson v Automattic: Did Automattic succeed by the skin of its teeth?

Published by Richard Best

Focus of this post As many in the WordPress community will know by now thanks to Jeff Chandler’s helpful post on the case, recently Chris Pearson was unsuccessful in his complaint against Automattic regarding its purchase of the thesis.com domain name. Pearson had sought to have the domain transferred to him. I want to say a few things about this case but I’m not going to get emotional about it nor will I publish any comments that come across as hostile, abusive or potentially defamatory. My interest is to point out a few things that do not seem prominent in the discussions I’ve seen to date and to do so from a hopefully dispassionate legal perspective. Facts The key facts seem to be these: Many years ago, Chris Pearson developed a theme for WordPress called Thesis. When released, Pearson did not license Thesis under the GPL. In due course, there was heated if not acrimonious debate between Matt Mullenweg and Pearson as to the licensing of Thesis. Mullenweg argued that Thesis should be licensed under …

How not to source images for your client’s websites

Published by Richard Best

If you’re a designer who source images for a client’s website, do you ensure you and your client have the right to use them? An interesting wee tale A UK case from 2012 provides a number of important reminders for those who design and own websites, including public sector agencies (Hoffman v Drug Abuse Resistance Education (UK) Ltd [2012] EWPCC 2 (19 January 2012)). It’s an interesting tale about a website owner who copied photos from another website in the mistaken belief that they were Crown copyright photos that could be re-used without permission when, in fact, they could not. There’s a photographer, a charity, a web developer, a government-sponsored website, the photos and … a copyright infringement claim. This isn’t a WordPress-specific story, but one that may be of interest to some WordPress users. Briefly, the main facts appearing from the judgment are these: Mr Hoffman was the copyright owner of a range of photos of drugs; the defendant charity published copies of those photos on its website; the defendant had used a web …

WordPress Foundation v Yablon and PC-VIP, Inc

Published by Richard Best

Introduction As many will know, the WordPress Foundation has commenced court proceedings against Mr Yablon and PC-VIP, Inc in relation to the use of “WordPress” in “The WordPress Helpers” website and multiple domain names: thewordpresshelpers.com, thewordpresshelpdesk.com, thewordpresstrainers.com, thewordpressteachers.com, thewordpressdoctors.com, wordpresstraffic.com and thewordpresstutors.com. Attempts to resolve the matter without resorting to court proceedings have, it seems, been unsuccessful. The WordPress Foundation’s complaint against Mr Yablon and PC-VIP, Inc, filed with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, contains five claims for relief. It also seeks a jury trial. The complaint is available online if you’d like to read it. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread I don’t propose to express an opinion on whether and if so how many of the claims may succeed. Not only is it more appropriate to leave that to US trademark and cybersquatting attorneys but we are yet to see a statement of defence from the defendants and we are probably not fully aware of the full range of facts (other than the obvious ones) …

Using stock imagery in your or a client’s WordPress site – beware of the terms of use

Published by Richard Best

Introduction A designer friend once let me in on a secret, a secret she described as “the designer’s little secret”. She was referring to istockphoto.com as a preferred source of reasonably priced images for commercial and other use. That was many years ago now. Since that time istockphoto has become a part of Getty Images (and is now known as iStock) and we’ve seen a proliferation of competing stock imagery sites such as shutterstock.com, graphicriver.net, mychillybin.co.nz, dollarphotoclub.com, dreamstime.com, bigstockphoto.com and fotolia.com among many others. Stock images are everywhere these days, including on the pages of WordPress-driven websites the world over. I’ve used them, for both myself and clients, and I’ve reviewed the terms of use of multiple stock imagery sites that clients have been thinking of using, with a view to alerting them to risks of which they may need to be aware. Now here’s the thing: not all stock imagery websites are made equal. I’m not talking about the range, quality or cost of their images, but of the terms of use that govern …

Using Creative Commons licensed images on your site with confidence

Published by Richard Best

Introduction As many readers will know, when sourcing images for your blog or website, you can’t just do a Google images search, find an image you like, copy it and insert it in your post editor. Well, you can, physically, but legally this is a recipe for copyright infringement. If you don’t have your own images, two common alternatives are to: purchase a licence to images from the likes of iStock, Shutterstock and Bigstock; or find and use images that have been either licensed under a Creative Commons licence or released into the public domain under CC0 (pronounced CC zero). In this post, I’m going to focus on the latter: Creative Commons. Whilst some people are familiar with Creative Commons licensing, many people are not, particularly if they’ve had no need to use Creative Commons-licensed material in the past or to release material under a Creative Commons licence. For this reason, I’m going to: introduce Creative Commons and its licences; and explain how to comply with the attribution requirements that are common to all of …

When changing your terms of use, do you respect your customers?

Published by Richard Best

Recently I received an email from a WordPress-related business telling me its terms of use had been updated. The email didn’t specify what had changed so, for some strange reason (a lawyer’s idle curiosity perhaps), I clicked through to see the latest terms, half hoping to see a change log or a blog post summarising what had changed. Did I find any such thing? No. The terms themselves only had a “Last modified on X date” entry. No change log. No explanatory blog post. And the site contained no archive of previous versions that would enable me to do an automated comparison, assuming I’d be motivated enough to do that. (I suppose one could try the Wayback Machine but a paying customer shouldn’t need to resort to that.) These terms were over 4,500 words long. I’m not sure how any user is supposed to understand what has changed in these circumstances. In many if not most countries, users will bound by the changes, thanks to what’s called a unilateral variation clause (a clause that allows …

Click to accept processes: a closer look at Gravity Perks

Published by Richard Best

Context As you might have gathered from some of my earlier posts, I’m a big fan of Gravity Forms, a fantastic plugin that just gets better and better with the passage of time. I’ve used Gravity Forms in the past to create ‘click to accept’ mechanisms but, at least as I’ve deployed them, they required inclusion of a link to terms of use which would then open up in a new window or tab (for anyone who bothered to read them). With this approach the terms themselves weren’t visible on the same page as the click to accept box. Legally this wasn’t a problem but perhaps it wasn’t the most user-friendly approach. In Legal checks when building a content-driven WordPress website I mentioned that you could go one step further by purchasing and installing the Gravity Perks plugin which includes a GP Terms of Service Perk. I noticed that this add-on for Gravity Forms helpfully adds a Terms of Service field to the available Advanced Fields and can produce something like this: At that point …

Quarterly round-up: Legal info, tips and templates for WordPressers

Published by Richard Best

WP and Legal Stuff has been live for three months. For this reason I thought I’d have a crack at writing a “quarterly round-up”, for people new to the blog, that provides an overview of all posts to date. I pondered whether to post the round-up here or somewhere else. I’ve never posted to Medium before so I thought I’d post it there. (Having done so, I have to say (dare I say?), that Medium has a pretty gorgeous posting interface. Anyway, I digress… .) Here’s a link to the post: WP and Legal Stuff: Legal info, tips, tricks and templates for WordPressers (Featured image courtesy of William Iven who released it on Unsplash.com under CC0. Thanks William!)

Template terms and policies for WordPress multisite businesses

Published by Richard Best

Introduction As many if not most readers will know, with WordPress’ multisite feature, you can set up your own network of sites, whether for yourself, friends, clients or customers. The WordPress Codex puts it in these terms: “As of WordPress 3.0, you have the ability to create a network of sites by using the multisite feature. … A multisite network can be very similar to your own personal version of WordPress.com. End users of your network can create their own sites on demand, just like end users of WordPress.com can create blogs on demand. If you do not have any need to allow end users to create their own sites on demand, you can create a multisite network in which only you, the administrator, can add new sites. A multisite network is a collection of sites that all share the same WordPress installation. They can also share plugins and themes. The individual sites in the network are virtual sites in the sense that they do not have their own directories on your server, although they …

Protecting WordPress consultancies with terms of business

Published by Richard Best

Let’s take a look at WordPress consultancies As readers will know, the WordPress marketplace comprises a wide range of business types, including: development and design agencies; theme and plugin shops; website generation platforms; app platforms; and consultancy businesses. For this post I want to focus on the last of these: WordPress consultancy businesses. These are the sorts of businesses that provide the likes of: commercial advice and coaching in relation to WordPress-related businesses (think Chris Lema); advice and training materials on how to “become an exceptional WordPress consultant” (WP Elevation) or on how to “kickstart your WordPress business” (Matt Report Pro); and WordPress workshop and on-site training services (like BobWP). These kinds of businesses do not necessarily provide any development or design services (they may do as separate services but that’s not my focus here). Rather, their services are more commercial, strategic or educational in nature. If you own or work for such a WordPress consultancy, you may have asked yourself about the kind of contractual terms you should be putting in place with your …