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by chrisandchris 636 days ago
> 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.
2 comments
camgunz 636 days ago
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.
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malermeister 636 days ago
If you sell my aspirin in your shop, you will have to accept what I put on the packaging or stop carrying my product.
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chrisandchris 636 days ago
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)

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Matticus_Rex 636 days ago
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.

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FireBeyond 636 days ago
> 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.

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Matticus_Rex 634 days ago
Tortious interference requires that the interfering party induce the party to the contract to a breach of the contract. Where's that element?
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FireBeyond 633 days ago
Inducement? Like "We have blocked the ability to access plugin and other repositories for customers of WPEngine. We have not done so for this other, "independent", for-profit entity (that just so happens to be owned by the same person)"?
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mthoms 636 days ago
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.

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keane 636 days ago
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/
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mthoms 635 days ago
Some important nuance is lost here. Matt Mullenweg transferred the trademark to the WordPress Foundation (which he is head of) and the foundation (again... Matt himself) in turn granted Automattic the exclusive ability to sub-license the name commercially. This is the important bit.

What this means is that any "licensing fee" would be paid to Matt's private, for-profit, VC-backed company (and direct competitor to WPEngine) and there would be zero accountability for how it would be spent.

In practice, the foundation doesn't enjoy any benefit to owning the marks. It's all smoke and mirrors.

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Matticus_Rex 634 days ago
How does that look worse?
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mthoms 634 days ago
Do I need to spell it out? The foundation is headed by the same person who they granted an exclusive license to. Not just a commercial license to use the trademarks. It's permission to sub-license the trademarks for profit without restriction. It's blatant self-dealing.

It's an obvious conflict of interest for a foundation that is supposed to be serving the community.

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