Judge hands WP Engine a win in legal fight with Automattic WordPress hosting firm Automattic and its CEO Matthew Mullenweg have been ordered to stop interfering with the business of rival WP Engine. California District Court judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín on Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction [PDF] against Automattic and Mullenweg, finding that plaintiff WP Engine is likely to …
I can't help wondering if this whole shambles has any connection to the random spam emails I'm receiving on an almost daily basis with a Wordpress account login link that all started arriving around the August/September time frame. It's not a good look for Wordpress in any case.
The question is 'which Wordpress?'.
Regardless of which side started this lover's tiff, when you start attempting to damage reputation as Matthew Mullenweg appears to have done you've rung a bell you cannot unring. Ironically, it doesn't make you look good if you're the disparaging party and it sows distrust. I'm not impressed.
"A spokesperson for Automattic told The Register: "Today's ruling is a preliminary order designed to maintain the status quo. It was made without the benefit of discovery, our motion to dismiss, or the counterclaims we will be filing against WP Engine shortly. We look forward to prevailing at trial as we continue to protect the open source ecosystem during full-fact discovery and a full review of the merits.""
I've been in the game a long time, and other than being the reason for the proliferation of shit websites, what has Automattic/WordPress actually contributed to the open source community?
Burn WordPress, Burn.
While Mullenweg‘s behaviour in this has been ….errr ….questionable AB’s I’m in no way defending him, I can’t see how a judge can force him to open up access to the Wordpress website for WP. It’s HIS website (ok - technically it might not be his) - surely he can do what he likes with it
I can’t see how a judge can force him to open up access
Probably as well you're not a judge then. Injunctions typically have to pass a high threshold of immediate harm that could not adequately be mitigated by a future financial settlement. I think it would be safest to work from the assumption that the judge has some training in his various duties and has reasonable grounds for his decision and that his duties do not include ensuring that commentards entirely unconnected to the case are entirely satisfied by his reasoning.
To give OP the benefit of the doubt, I don't see that they're necessarily claiming that the judge is wrong here- just that they can't personally see or think of the legal basis of it themselves.
And, to some extent, I'm wondering the same thing.
Blocking WPEngine is a dick move by Mullenweg purely because- even if his criticism of WPEngine's behaviour *is* legitimate- exploiting his company's power over the update mechanism (that pretty much everyone has come to accept and use) to attack a specific company for blatantly partisan reasons risks destroying the trustworthiness that relies upon, and has arguably already done so.
But from a purely legal point of view, I'd be interested to hear *why* he might not be allowed to do that.
His attempt to leverage his control over the trademark alongside this in order to attack WPEngine for their alleged misuse of it is *far* more legally questionable- even before we get to the blurred lines and conflict of interest between his roles within (the for-profit) Automattic and the non-profit Wordpress Foundation- but I'm not sure how much, if any, of that is relevant to site access being blocked.
Then again, since these nominally separate issues *are* so closely-tied to the same underlying conflict, I assume that the judge may have felt it was acceptable to force Mullenweg to put the entire drama on hold until the various issues *could* be sorted out, disentangled and dealt with separately?
(All guesswork, IANAL, obviously).
I might have had a bit more sympathy if the OP hadn't offered as the alternative view, it’s HIS website ... - surely he can do what he likes with it.
You don't need any knowledge of the law, just some critical thinking skills to subsitute for X in it’s HIS X - surely he can do what he likes with it in ways that rather undermine the basic premise. For example:
X = Currency Printing Press
X = Rocket-propelled grenade launcher
X = Child bride
X = Collection of flimsily bottled Ebola samples
X = Portal to Galactic Doom
It's not mere ignorance at play here, it's the kind of entitled ignorance that seems, unfortunately, to have become the norm in "legal" discussions on social media: the law does not now, and never has, operated on the basis that it's mine so I can do what I like. And in this case we're in even more complex commercial litigation over contractual issues and whether commercial contracts have been broken.
However, the judgment is linked from the article. It's a lengthy, but straightforward read. The conclusions are set out very clearly. If anyone actually wants to understand, and not simply fire off a random expression of their beliefs about the sovereignty of property rights, it's all there and it's self-explanatory. You do, however, have to do the work and not expect that other people will heal your reality gap.
It's not forcing Mullenweg to open up his website per se, but rather stopping Mullenwegs closing of his website to traffic from WP Engine.
For example
10 if incoming traffic = WP Engine source
20 print "Feck off"
30 goto 10
The judge is ordering that the above is removed. The service is available, just Mullenweg is explicitly denying it to WP Engine by something like the above. If the code wasn't there, then the traffic like spice, would flow. That's the difference. The traffic isn't flowing, because he is going out of his way to stop it.
Sure. But the question is, why in law is he required *not* to discriminate against another company in this way?
If it was a person, and that person was being discriminated against on the grounds of their gender or race or whatever, then specific rules apply. But it's not.
Is this some sort of anti-trust legislation: "don't sh*t on your competitors?" Or something else?
Whose accounts do the costs for running the website appear in, Mullenweg's, Automattic's or WordPress Foundation's a non profit* ?
If Mullenweg or Automattic fund the site they own and can do what they like with it, except use the domain name WordPress.org. WordPress is a trade mark owned by WordPress Foundation. From https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
"All other WordPress-related businesses or projects can use the WordPress name and logo to refer to and explain their services, but they cannot use them as part of a product, project, service, domain name, or company name..."
If WordPress Foundation fund the site they own it, Automattic are just the hosting the site if it is on their servers.
Whichever the case Mullenweg is using his position on the board of WordPress Foundation to further his business interests in Automattic against a business rival. I suspect there are laws against using a non profit charitable organization for your own business interests.
The judge could seize the domain and give ownership to WordPress Foundation and remove Mullenweg from the board of WordPress Foundation. If Mullenweg or Automattic own (funding) the site Automattic will just host it under a new domain that does not include WordPress in its name causing problems for every WordPress site no matter who is hosing it. If WordPress Foundation own (funding) the site that would open up access to WP.
*The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg... https://wordpressfoundation.org
This is a preliminary injunction. The point here is that two parties are in dispute; the judge imposes an injunction to prevent one of the parties from causing irreparable harm to the other.
Blocking security updates and the ability of WP Engine to update its own plugins in the generally accepted common location for Wordpress plugins is a form of irreparable harm. So the judge has handed down an injunction forcing Automattic to allow business as usual in these respects while the case works its way through the courts.
Once the case has been decided one way or the other, the injunction will be lifted, and replaced with whatever orders are made at the end of the case. It's a stopgap, in other words.
If Automattic is found to be in the right, the harm to them by the injunction is relatively low. If they're found to be in the wrong, the harm to WP Engine by the behaviour blocked by the injunction will be considerable. Hence the injunction. It's not a question of who is likely to prevail, in other words - it's purely and simply about making sure that anything that happens during the trial can easily be fixed if the party doing it is found to be in the wrong.
@Arglebarglewargle "If Automattic is found to be in the right, the harm to them by the injunction is relatively low. If they're found to be in the wrong, the harm to WP Engine by the behaviour blocked by the injunction will be considerable. Hence the injunction. It's not a question of who is likely to prevail, in other words - it's purely and simply about making sure that anything that happens during the trial can easily be fixed if the party doing it is found to be in the wrong."
Who is likely to prevail most certainly is a question, its just not the only question. To get a preliminary injunction WP Engine had to establish not just they would suffer suffer irreparable harm, they also had to establish they were likely to prevail.
From the ruling the Judge lists the bars WP Engine had to pass to get a preliminary injunction. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.437474/gov.uscourts.cand.437474.64.0.pdf
“A preliminary injunction is an extraordinary remedy never awarded as of right.” Winter v. Nat. Res. Def. Council, Inc., 555 U.S. 7, 24 (2008) (citation omitted). “A plaintiff seeking a preliminary injunction must establish [1] that [it] is likely to succeed on the merits, [2] that [it] is likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary relief, [3] that the balance of equities tips in [its] favor, and [4] that an injunction is in the public interest.”
Because WPEngine has demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of at least one of its claims,14 the Court proceeds to the next element of the Winter test – irreparable harm.
Even though I'm self-hosting my own WordPress setup, I'm looking towards alternatives, and have been since the crazy came out. I know I'm not the only one, based on group chats I'm a part of.
This is the internet version of "one 'oh, shit' can do away with a thousand 'atta boy's".
I literally have no financial skin in the game, I'd never heard of WP Engine before the start of all these shenanigans. Someone is going down the John McAfee route here...
Wordpress? Ah yes. That will be the thing that I do not run that fills up my logs with request to log into it. Maybe I should put that wp-login.php file saying "Not Installed Feck Off" back up. Then again repeatedly getting 404 does not seem to sink into the heads of the script kiddies.
Then again repeatedly getting 404 does not seem to sink into the heads of the script kiddies.
Through a bit of silliness I found out that if returning 404 doesn't stop people/bots repeatedly hammering your web site for non-existent pages that might be vulnerable, returning 418 ("I'm a teapot") seems to discourage at least some of them. I now configure nginx so that all requests without a Host: header (i.e. scans by IP address) get 418 status codes. It's probably not fully RFC compliant, but who cares if it reduces the noise in my logs.
int main(enter the void)... The Register 
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