In reply to Chip Bennett.

I think there is confusion here. It's Automattic waving their copyrights as applicable to US law to their APIs. If you take WordPress the open source project out of the equation, then does it make more sense what Automattic did?

WordPress.org shouldn't even be part of the conversation since it's not related. This is about Automattic, their APIs for interacting with WordPress.com and claiming no copyright on them.