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You can find it here.
Here's what they are claiming:
- Intentional Interference with Contractual Relations;
- Intentional Interference with Prospective Economic Relations;
- Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030 et seq.;
- Attempted Extortion;
- Unfair Competition, Cal. Bus. Prof. Code § 17200, et seq.;
- Promissory Estoppel;
- Declaratory Judgment of Non-Infringement;
- Declaratory Judgment of Non-Dilution;
- Libel;
- Trade Libel; and
- Slander.
The TLDR for what's in the filings:
- Lawsuit appears to be against Automattic Inc., the company, and Matt personally
- Pretty much everything that's been said in public over the last week or two is included (which is why you generally want to keep your mouth shut).
- They want a jury trial
- They claim the Stripe issue is basically a nothing-burger, the revenue is only $2k/mo
- They claim Matt tried to poach Heather to Automattic, and when she didn't agree, he was going to make it public
- They claim they didn't know about this for 18 months, as it was basically some type of hosting partnership at first
- The claim the IRS wasn't properly informed of the trademark license transfer to the WordPress Foundation, as it's not listed in the Foundation filings
These are big words.
Full court WordPress
As expected, half the complaint is screenshots of Matt putting his foot in his mouth.
Page 14 details the private inurement and self-dealing that a few here and elsewhere have been harping on for the past few days. That’s state and federal level problems for WPF/Automattic/MM.
There’s a well-known bit from ‘The Wire’ about the inadvisability of taking notes on a criminal conspiracy, and while Matt has not *technically* violated it (or, to be clear, charged criminally…yet), it’s something I imagine he’ll be wishing he followed the spirit of soon enough.
This is a case about abuse of power, extortion, and greed.
I had to Google most of these, so in case someone needs an ELI5 like I did:
1) “you knew we had a contract with this party, and you intentionally and directly caused them to breach that contract”
2) “you intentionally interfered with existing business relationships that we had”
3) “you broke in to a protected computer that you had no right to, with the intent to defraud us”
4) “you tried to use threats to extort money or property from us (but failed lol)”
5) “your bad (or fraudulent) business practices/unfair advertising cost us money”
6) “you made a promise strongly enough that it should be treated like a contract, we acted on that promise, and you changed the deal unfairly.“
7) “moooom! Tell him that I’m not infringing on his patents!”
8) “moooom! Tell him that my ads don’t dilute his trademark!”
9) “you wrote some stuff about us that is not even kinda true, and we lost money because of it”
10) “you wrote some stuff about our business that is not even kinda true, and we lost money because of it”
11) “you said some stuff about us that is not even kinda true, and we lost money because of it”
Obvious disclaimer: I’m a WordPress jockey googling in my office parking lot, not a lawyer. Most of these are probably at least a little wrong.
What is the likelihood of Automattic losing the trademark to WordPress as a result of this case?
>In the same September 28, 2024 interview, Mullenweg was defiant and unremorseful for his wrongful acts, and even asked WPE to “please sue me.”
– quote from man sued
Meanwhile Matt is still cooking on his 𝕏 account.
Half the complaint is citations of him running his mouth.
I’m telling you, he can’t stop because he’s unwell.
Page 30 discusses the WooCommerce / Stripe issue, again confirming what many who have used WP Engine were saying—a small subset of WP Engine users opt to use a different Stripe plugin instead of the built-in WooCommerce Stripe integration for added functionality (I, for one, have done this). Additionally, MM said WPE makes “tens of millions of dollars” with this plugin, but apparently, it’s only about $2K a month. That tracks because Stripe is stingy. Haha.
We need that lawyer from Twitch who read the C&D last week to read through this…
Im gonna drop some interesting stuff as I read it:
>Before allowing participation in this program, Mullenweg required that “Any person or business currently misusing or infringing on the WordPress trademark will need to fix any misuse before their pledge will appear on the Five for the Future pledge page.” Mullenweg knowingly published WPE’s pledge to this program on wordpress.org, thereby acknowledging that WPE was not “misusing or infringing on” the WordPress trademark.
>It appears Mullenweg also did not disclose the license agreement in the WordPress Foundation’s filings with the IRS, and none of WordPress Foundation’s fourteen years of publicly available federal reporting to the IRS indicates that the WordPress Foundation was compensated in any form for granting an exclusive, fully-paid, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sublicensable license for trademarks Defendants now claim are incredibly valuable. Indeed, while the Foundation has failed to ever disclose to the IRS its ownership of the trademarks or existence of the exclusive royalty-free license to Automattic, for the past seven years Mullenweg himself executed the IRS forms on behalf of the Foundation under penalties of perjury, an apparent false certification to the IRS and public that the Foundation’s Forms 990 were true, correct, and complete.
This is not going to end well for the WP community.
The texts from Matt trying to poach WP Engine’s CEO (pages 35-36) are wild. In what universe would anybody accept that offer?
Transcribed below (note, Greg Mondres is the co-CEO of Silver Lake)
======================
*September 28 at 2:57 PM*
**Matt:** Heather, I’m so sorry for what Silver Lake is making you do. If you want to use this as an opportunity to jump ship my previous offer of matching all their economics still stands.
*September 29 at 2:10 PM*
**Matt:** Heather, after our extensive discussions about you joining Automattic, the offer you negotiated with me is still on the table.
* You can join Automattic and match all of your compensation economics, as we discussed in January.
* I will extend that matching to anyone from WE who wants to follow you. (You said you wanted to do right by your team; this addresses it.)
Let me know by midnight PT if you decline or accept this offer.
If you decline, on Monday morning, I tell Greg Mondres:
* Lee’s refusal to negotiate terms to resolve our conflict.
* Your interviewing with Automattic over the past year.
* I will possibly tell the press all of the above.
Page 34 attempts to blow up MM’s claim that they’ve been after WPE for 18 months about the trademark infringement. They claim that’s false, and that the first they heard about trademark violations was in September from Automattic. According to WPE, they were actually in discussions to participate in a WooCommerce Partner Program throughout much of 2024 until it abruptly stopped communication in August.
Good. Matt is out of control and needs to step down.
Matt has begun the FO part of FAFO.
> In 2010, in response to mounting public concern, the WordPress source code and trademarks were placed into the nonprofit WordPress Foundation (which Mullenweg created), with Mullenweg and Automattic making sweeping promises of open access for all: “Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation, the nonprofit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress’s identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company.” Mullenweg and Automattic reiterated this promise later, in even more forceful terms: “What’s important is that [] longer than I’m alive, longer than Automattic is alive, longer than any of us are alive, there is something that holds the WordPress code and trademark for the free access for the world.”
>
> What Defendants’ statements and assurances did not disclose is that while they were publicly touting their purported good deed of moving this intellectual property away from a private company, and into the safe hands of a nonprofit, Defendants in fact had quietly transferred irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic that very same day in 2010. This meant that far from being “independent of any company” as Defendants had promised, control over the WordPress trademarks effectively never left Automattic’s hands.
If this is true it’s pretty damning, maybe not from a legal standpoint but certainly from a credibility one.
Not surprised that the primeagen video turned up in their filing. Watching that I was just thinking, “why are you saying this out loud on the internet?! Are you out of your mind?”
Separate from this, but related: Automattic have a new [explainer post](https://automattic.com/2024/10/02/wordpress-trademarks-a-legal-perspective/) discussing who owns the trademarks. Unfortunately, the post does not account for Matts public description of the trademark as being independent from any company.
I’m glad that’s in the suit though.
Strap in guys and gals. It’s going to be a doozy.
As much as I don’t really like WP Engine, I feel like this whole mess has been created by Matt and a conflict of interest by him being in charge of WordPress the open source org and Automatic the for profit entity. When he was asking them to make payments, contribute more, or even just sitting down in a meeting, I would be confused in what role was he asking this.
Our IT company used to host with WP Engine 130+ sites, but we moved away when we noticed a lack of customer support and instability. We moved to Flywheel, but they ended up being bought by WP Engine, and as much as I was worried about them getting taken over, they did keep the platforms relatively seperate. So I’m not a fan of WP Engine, but they saw what we saw, there was a general lack of WordPress specific hosting that offered a platform as a service and not just hosting with WordPress compatibility. So that’s why they bought Flywheel because they had the same vision of what WordPress hosting and a platform should be. It saves my team countless hours per year.
If WordPress as a org, or as a for profit company offered the same service/platform, I would move to them in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t even care if they were modifying WordPress core as long as it made the platform better in general. I know Matt had a issue with the revisions getting nerfed, but honestly I’ve only had a couple clients ever want to use that feature. If making that a per request feature means 99% of my other sites get better SQL performance in general, I’m very happy to make that trade. Also WP Engine and Flywheel offer backups as part of the platform and a core backup method stored in the DB is not entirely required. This is where I think WordPress is falling off, it’s a CMS not a platform, if they open source a platform as a service, then this would all make more sense. But I don’t see any easy path to making that a reality.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726633
“Silver Lake and WPE’s legal attacks may impact my ability to provide free services on WordPress.org in the future, especially things like Slack or forums that are grounds for discovery.”
He is basically implying he has the ability to shut down the plugin repository but he is either too chicken to say it out loud or think he is being a super villain making veiled threats.
Where’s all the Matt simps usually all over these posts?
I don’t know what is going on, but maybe someone is suffering a psychotic episode. I don’t mean to stigmatize it or making fun of it at all.
I have been touched through my life by many people I knew who at one time, suffered some sort of episode, just like we get the flu or we get high blood pressure, sometimes the brain gets a “flu” and we need to treat it.
This could be what is going on here. Sometimes people need a helping hand instead of us piling on them.
It can happen to anyone at any time at any age. Stress and Trauma can even trigger it.
I find it particularly interesting that they assert the “doctrine of laches” in their complaint (pages 53 line 13 and page 55 line 3). This is basically legalese for “you didn’t move quickly enough to assert your rights.”
WPE didn’t explicitly ask the court to invalidate the trademark, but they did basically lay the groundwork. Someone else could come along and say “hey, WPE got a declaratory judgement for non-infringement and non-dilution, we should be entitled to one, too.”
This complaint is massive, and it’s thorough, but one thing it’s not is vindictive. They didn’t move to invalidate the trademark outright (which they could later assert). Seems they’re being rather rational in their argument here.