In reply to Ryan McCue.

Ryan, Legaly, what automattic claims is not important. If there is no explicit copyright assignment from the other contributors to automattic, then the copyright is mostly there, but not more then that.

The specifics are important here, and it does sound like automattic is the copyright holder for the code in dispute, but courts are a crazy place, you really don't want to get there and try to prove that X wrote the code when he was working for automattic and not in his free time on the weekend.