[camgunz]

Isn't this completely fine? If you and I both make aspirin, but we both put a little something extra in it (me vanilla, you salt) and I put banners on my web page saying "bastawhiz's salty aspirin puts the ass in aspirin", doesn't this just seem like typical rivalry? My point here is that defamation is defamation no matter the scale. I think scale is relevant re: damages, but not as to whether or not rivalry escalated to defamation in the first place.

[chrisandchris]

> Automattic put a banner in every WordPress dashboard on the subject, including WordPress instances hosted by WPE

> I put banners on my web

There's a large difference between putting up a banner on _your_ site and abusing your position to put a banner on _every_ site you can.

[camgunz]

One person's "abuse" is another person's "I have this platform and can use it however I like." For another example, whenever cable companies (dish, etc.) have licensing disagreements with content creators, they put up a bunch of ads that are like, "ESPN's unfair negotiations mean you may lose access to this channel, call this number to complain". That's never been found to be defamatory--it occurs to this day.

[malermeister]

If you sell my aspirin in your shop, you will have to accept what I put on the packaging or stop carrying my product.

[chrisandchris]

That's true, but does not apply to this situation.

Automattic is not the owner of WordPress, the WordPress Foundation is. Even though many employees of Automattic work (maybe full-time) on WordPress [1].

So I sell your aspirin in my shop, and a friend of yours helped you package your aspirins and while doing that put some stickers onto your aspirin.

[1] https://www.df.eu/blog/wer-steckt-hinter-wordpress-ueber-die... (German)

[Matticus_Rex]

Does WPF take issue with this operational decision by Automattic? If so, they have the avenues to deal with it, and they're the party who can claim to be aggrieved, if it violates some duty Automattic has to WPF. I seems more like this, from my understanding:

You sell a brand of aspirin in your shop. The brand has outsourced most of the production and decision-making to another company. That company puts messages on the bottle. If those messages bother me, I can bring it up with the brand and see if they'll address it, or stop carrying the brand, but the question of whether they've overstepped is for the brand owners rather than me.

[FireBeyond]

> and they're the party who can claim to be aggrieved, if it violates some duty Automattic has to WPF

Tortious interference - where one party (Automattic) interferes with a contractual relationship between two parties (WPengine, their customers), in this case by means of disparagement pushed to the dashboard of WPengine instances.

[Matticus_Rex]

Tortious interference requires that the interfering party induce the party to the contract to a breach of the contract. Where's that element?

[mthoms]

Here's the thing. Guess who is the head of the WordPress Foundation?

Matt Mullenweg. CEO of Automattic.

Now guess who The WordPress Foundation granted sole rights to sub-license their trademarks? You guessed it. Automattic.

Yeah, it gets worse the more you look at it.

[keane]

Automattic originally registered the trademark WordPress. They donated it to the WordPress Foundation while retaining a commercial license to the marks. https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-wordpress-foundation/

[Matticus_Rex]

How does that look worse?

[justinclift]

Nah. Putting disparaging claims directly on the dashboard of my customers seems pretty abusive, and if it happened to me I'd be looking at legal options too.

[tasuki]

Automatic are publishing a blog post and syndicating it to RSS, and some other software (WP.org) is displaying that feed.

If you choose to use the WP.org software as is, it's kind of your fault, isn't it?

[camgunz]

What about regular, non-disparaging claims? Isn't it a fact that WP Engine turns off the backup stuff? Truth's a defense to libel.

This seems to me plainly like regular old competition. Can you point to something that's clearly defamatory?

[bastawhiz]

No, it would be like if Google started using Google Tag Manager to put banners on websites that use Plausible Analytics saying "this website uses analytics that might not be accurate!" Or if Cloudflare started putting banners on websites that use S3 saying "downloads might be slow because this website doesn't use Cloudflare R2"