#automattic lawsuit

[netscapenavigator-official]

Automattic making some questionable decisions and getting the piss sued out of it isn't in the least surprising. Back when Matthew was busy doxxing and sexually harassing a trans woman he chased off of his site, former higher-up employees came forward and alleged that he is a chronic drug abuser who is too high on his own Elon Musk-esk ego to accept a helping hand from those in his life.

So I'm not surprised he's crashing his company into the ground. It's an exact mirror of what he did with his life. And now that his life is too ruined to ruin any further, he's reaching for anything and everything in his vicinity. That include Automattic, WordPress, and Tumblr. The only difference is that Matthew doesn't have Elon's money to maintain this unsustainable lifestyle.

He's going to crash and burn, and he's going to take Automattic with him.

[fishermod]

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/25/22949293/tumblr-nycchr-settlement-adult-content-ban-algorithmic-bias-lgbtq

For those who don't remember, here's the lawsuit two years ago where Tumblr (or specifically Automattic) settled with the New York City Commission on Human Rights regarding Tumblr's terribly implemented porn ban targeting LGBTQ folk more than it should. Here's an excerpt detailing what the NYCCHR ordered Tumblr to do:

The settlement gives Tumblr 180 days to hire an expert on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues and provide related training to moderators. It must also hire someone with experience in this area as well as expertise in image classification, who will review Tumblr’s moderation algorithms to see if they’re more likely to flag LGBTQ content. As part of an overall review, Tumblr will reexamine 3,000 old cases where a user successfully appealed a takedown, looking for patterns that could indicate bias.

Now, on a totally unrelated note, here's the complaint page for reporting discrimination to the NYCCHR. Completely unrelated to what's going on right now or the rest of this post, I swear.

[edited since it looks like the link broke somehow]

[edit #2: again, for unrelated reasons, here's a link to a post about the San Francisco equivalent]

[tinystepsforward]

What do you think the chances are that Mud Pit is gonna be ousted by the people who need Automattic to have good will in the eyes of the community to actually get anything out of this site and wattpad

I know it’s probably low but the fact that he’s acting like a poorer Elon Musk is making my skin crawl and making me hope that a second lawsuit hits the company

ok here's the thing. he is meant to be on sabbatical. automattic gives employees a three-month paid sabbatical every 5 years, so that they can have a break from the product they work on and come back rested and with a new perspective.

matt has never taken one before now. he spent the entire leadup to his sabbatical posting increasingly wild shit in public channels at the company (like the chess thing, or trying to get people to buy a friend's product, or the entire fracas with taking over the wordpress.org twitter account. wordpress.org is an independent non-profit that he is not the ceo of).

i mention this because people were hoping (including me) that he really would actually log off, have a chill time (or, idk, whatever kind of time CEOs who go off the grid bc they got flooded in at burning man like to have), and let the interim CEO get a chance to do a better job. that would help the board make a decision based on data.

he was very clearly spiraling before he even left, and then within the first few days of Company Sanctioned Log Off Time he's pulled multiple Classic Matt things on multiple parts of the company before showing up here. this whole thing is so deeply unfunny but it also is a bit of a tom and jerry or looney tunes bit, where i can only imagine HR or Legal is chasing him around the various accounts/platforms with a comically large inflatable baseball bat and he's just evading them.

he can't do that in person, but he still gets a lot of leeway generally. at the last division meetup (irl meeting for employees, flown from all over the world) he showed up twitchy and exhausted and hyped in a way that was very familiar to me from flatmates who used to steal and snort my adhd medication, then proceeded to drink so much over the course of an evening answering questions from his employees that he had to be firmly babysat off the stage and walked back into the lobby of the hotel to sober up.

i made eye contact with him that night, before he dropped his head back into his hands. two people relatively high up in the company were sitting with him, silently watching him as he struggled to sober up. it wasn't the first drunk shenanigan of his i witnessed at one of these, and this is purely opinion but i have to assume that his current behavior is the result of suddenly having time on his hands to have the world's longest bender and post through it.

back to your question: i do not know if what he's done is enough to get the board to remove him. i wish it didn't have to come to this to hope that they will. but we'll find out.

[unpretty]

this has a very good summary of everything that's been going on with wordpress if you haven't been keeping up with it, i'm going to copy/paste the list of Goings On from the table of contents to give you an idea:

I’m sorry, what happened?

Automattic approaches WP Engine to offer a “license”

Matt’s rejected, so he tries new strategies

Wait—what’s Matt’s actual deal? Why is he doing this?

Matt claims WP Engine is misrepresenting itself

Matt claims WP Engine is selling a “cheap knock-off” of WordPress

Matt says WP Engine doesn't give back enough

An aside on motivations and justifications

The WordCamp US fallout and Matt’s abuse of power

WP Engine’s reaction

Matt melts down

Matt goes nuclear

Updates: everything that’s happened since October 1st

Matt talks taking over WP Engine

Automattic releases the terms sheet, which kinda backfires

WP Engine files suit against Matt and Automattic

Matt offers buyouts to Automattic employees

159 Automattic employees take the buyout; Matt hires a famous lawyer who's a horrible human

Matt gleefully exposes a vulnerability in ACF, but prevents WPE from fixing it

Matt adds a vague anti-WP Engine checkbox to WordPress.org, but fails to clarify why, all while playing the victim

Matt commandeers ACF, using WordPress.org to steal a competitor's product

Previous lawsuits against Matt come to light

Matt responds to the 'other lawsuits'

Matt wars against dissenters with second buyout offer; threatens employees who speak out; intercepts employees' emails

WP Engine files an injunction to regain access to WordPress.org

[catgirlhell]

i still cant get over this. i've been on tumblr in some form for more than 12 years. my first credit as an artist on something in print came from meeting people on tumblr. my art finds a very specific niche on tumblr.

i rode out the "russian chaos agents" shit. i rode out the porn ban. i've managed to stay on this stupid fucking website for more than a decade despite the people running it slowly churning it into grist. and now everything i have ever made and uploaded to it has been dumped into the fucking plagiarism bot that's actively putting me out of work.

i hope automattic fucking crumbles. i hope that whiny little millionaire gets buries in lawsuits. i cant even delete my work off of here because they did this shit under our noses. fuck this shit man.

[mint-mumbles]

Not even a year after his Tumblr meltdown over trans women, Matt “Photomatt” Mullenweg is STILL digging his own grave

Here’s his response to a lawsuit filed against him (spoiler, it’s just him being cringe (don’t like that word but that’s the only way I can describe this) and the article saying “meritless” over and over again):

Here’s how the news is covering it:

Meanwhile, Matt has been losing it:

Links attached to Matt’s posts in the first and third photographs:

Anyway, keep digging your grave, Matt. It’s an honor to have been blocked by a scumbag like you 😊

[anarchywoofwoof]

Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, is required to remove a controversial login checkbox from WordPress.org and let WP Engine back into its ecosystem after a judge granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction in its ongoing lawsuit.  In addition to removing the checkbox—which requires users to denounce WP Engine before proceeding—the preliminary injunction orders that Automattic is enjoined from “blocking, disabling, or interfering with WP Engine’s and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’ access to wordpress.org” or “interfering with WP Engine’s control over, or access to, plugins or extensions (and their respective directory listings) hosted on wordpress.org that were developed, published, or maintained by WP Engine,” the order states. In the immediate aftermath of the decision, Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg asked for his account to be deleted from the Post Status Slack, which is a popular community for businesses and people who work on WordPress’s open-source tools. 

“It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this,” he wrote in that Slack, according to a screenshot viewed by 404 Media. “I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted.” His username on that Slack has been changed to “gone 💀” Mullenweg began to publicly denounce WP Engine in September, calling the web hosting platform a “cancer” to the larger Wordpress open-source project and accusing it of improperly using the WordPress brand. He’s “at war” with WP Engine, in his own words.  In October, Mullenweg added a required checkbox at login for WordPres.org, forcing users to agree that they are not affiliated with WP Engine. The checkbox asked users to confirm, “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.” The checkbox was still present and required on the WordPress.org login page as of Wednesday morning. Automattic and Mullenweg have 72 hours from the order to take it down, according to the judge’s order.  WP Engine sent a cease and desist demanding that he “stop making and retract false, harmful and disparaging statements against WP Engine,” the platform posted on X.  Automattic sent back its own cease and desist, saying, “Your unauthorized use of our Client’s intellectual property has enabled WP Engine to compete with our Client unfairly, and has led to unjust enrichment and undue profits.” WP Engine filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg, accusing them of extortion and abuse of power. In October, Mullenweg announced that he’d given Automattic employees a buyout package, and 159 employees, or roughly 8.4 percent of staff, took the offer. “I feel much lighter,” he wrote. But shortly after, he reportedly complained that the company was now “very short staffed.”   All of this has created an environment of chaos and fear within Automattic and in the wider WordPress open-source community.  Within 72 hours of the order, Automattic and Mullenweg are also required to remove the “purported” list of WP Engine customers contained in the ‘domains.csv’ file linked to Automattic’s website wordpressenginetracker.com, which Automattic launched in November and tracks sites that have left WP Engine. It’s also required to restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org, including reactivating and restoring all WP Engine employee login credentials to wordpress.org resources and “disable any technological blocking of WPEngine’s and Related Entities’ access to wordpress.org that occurred on or around September 25, 2024, including IP address blocking or other blocking mechanisms.” The judge also ordered Mullenweg to restore WP Engine’s access to its Advanced Custom Fields (“ACF”) plugin directory, which its team said was “unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent” and called it a “new precedent” in betrayal of community access. “We are grateful that the court has granted our motion for a preliminary injunction,” a spokesperson for WP Engine told 404 Media. “The order will bring back much-needed stability to the WordPress ecosystem. WP Engine is focused on serving our partners and customers and working with the community to find ways to ensure a vigorous, and thriving WordPress community.” A spokesperson for Automattic told 404 Media: “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.” 

[theoutcastrogue]

"Automattic Inc. and its founder have been sued by a WordPress hosting company that alleges an extortion scheme to extract payments for use of the trademark for the open source WordPress software. Hosting firm WP Engine sued Automattic and founder Matt Mullenweg in a complaint filed yesterday in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

"This is a case about abuse of power, extortion, and greed," the lawsuit said. "The misconduct at issue here is all the more shocking because it occurred in an unexpected place—the WordPress open source software community built on promises of the freedom to build, run, change, and redistribute without barriers or constraints, for all."

The lawsuit alleged that "over the last two weeks, Defendants have been carrying out a scheme to ban WPE from the WordPress community unless it agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars to Automattic for a purported trademark license that WPE does not even need."

The complaint says that Mullenweg blocked WP Engine "from updating the WordPress plugins that it publishes through wordpress.org," and "withdrew login credentials for individual employees at WPE, preventing them from logging into their personal accounts to access other wordpress.org resources, including the community Slack channels which are used to coordinate contributions to WordPress Core, the Trac system which allows contributors to propose work to do on WordPress, and the SubVersion system that manages code contributions."

The lawsuit makes accusations, including libel, slander, and attempted extortion, and demands a jury trial. The lawsuit was filed along with an exhibit that shows Automattic's demand for payment. A September 23 letter to WP Engine from Automattic's legal team suggests "a mere 8% royalty" on WP Engine's roughly $400 million in annual revenue, or about $32 million."

[brucesterling]

Meanwhile, at Tumblr's corporate HQ

Automattic Alignment

October 3, 2024Automattic

Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Since I last blogged here, WP Engine filed a meritless lawsuit and Automattic responded, and there’s been a hurricane of public activity and press. Inside of Automattic, there’s been a parallel debate and process.

Silver Lake and WP Engine’s attacks on me and Automattic, while spurious, have been effective. It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.

So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher. But you’d lose access to Automattic that evening, and you wouldn’t be eligible to boomerang (what we call re-hires). HR added some extra details to sweeten the deal; we wanted to make it as enticing as possible.

I’ve been asking people to vote with their wallet a lot recently, and this is another example!

159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay! 63.5% were male. 53% were in the US. By division it impacted our Ecosystem / WordPress areas the most: 79.2% of the people who took it were in our Ecosystem businesses, compared to 18.2% from Cosmos (our apps like Pocket Casts, Day One, Tumblr, Cloudup). 18 people made over 200k/yr! 1 person started two days before the deadline. 4 people took it then changed their minds.

It was an emotional roller coaster of a week. The day you hire someone you aren’t expecting them to resign or be fired, you’re hoping for a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Every resignation stings a bit. 

However now, I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay. As the kids say, LFG!

[lilithsaintcrow]

"If he thinks the legal battle between WP Engine and Automattic is high stakes, he should get ready for the class-action lawsuit he might have opened himself up to."

[clouds-of-wings]

Staff has been so generous lately with the boops and the search parameters and all, I bet the higher-ups at Automattic are just so busy with all their Wordpress drama and lawsuits and everything that no one pays attention to the tumblr division and they get to do whatever they want.

[necronatural]

we need to send the tumblr moderation services to the fucking hell dimension so staff will stop having to just lie to users faces about how their talking to a brick wall efforts are going & automattic will be forced to hire literally any service that is not violently transphobic right after the fucking "violent anti-LGBT moderation" lawsuit

[aspiringbelle]

This could be interesting. There is a dispute over WordPress, and it could potentially affect Tumblr.

[mcbitchtits]

Found this while looking for Wordpress user responses to the AI scraping situation:

And I agree wholeheartedly. On top of that, I know AI firms are desperate for more input, anything to keep the machine churning, but I just don't see how Tumblr and Reddit and so forth benefit them as inputs. GIGO, as they say, which is not to say that Tumblr is garbage, but that Midjourney et al are already being sued by everyone left and right for copyright infringement! And these aren't preemtive theoreticals or anything:

Not to mention (from the 404 Media coverage):

the way the data was queried for the initial data dump to Midjourney/OpenAI means we compiled a list of all tumblr’s public post content between 2014 and 2023, but also unfortunately it included, and should not have included: - private posts on public blogs - posts on deleted or suspended blogs - unanswered asks (normally these are not public until they’re answered) - private answers (these only show up to the receiver and are not public) - posts that are marked ‘explicit’ / NSFW / ‘mature’ by our more modern standards (this may not be a big deal, I don’t know) - content from premium partner blogs (special brand blogs like Apple’s former music blog, for example, who spent money with us on an ad campaign) that may have creative that doesn’t belong to us, and we don’t have the rights to share with this-parties; this one is kinda unknown to me, what deals are in place historically and what they should prevent us from doing.

(bolding mine)

Those are all DIFFERENT grounds for lawsuits. Class action privacy lawsuits. Class action data lawsuits. Nonconsenual porn distribution. Taking in copyright-owned material directly, not to mention I remain convinced that scraping the website full of fan gifs — i.e. TV AND MOVIE CLIPS — is a recipe for getting your ass handed to you by thirty thousand media companies.

And they are desperate for input so there's no way they're going to have the ability to filter all of this accurately; not to mention, Tumblr seems to have either tested a data set or given them a data set already? So that shit's ALL JUST IN THERE ALREADY? BOIIIIIIIIIIIIII

It's one thing to pay to suck down, say, Shutterstock's database, which has creators uploading their work and only their work for reuse and distribution. Tumblr blog data is not clean like Shutterstock data. Tumblr is full of users sharing information and links with eachother, and fan blogs sharing things within fair use law, and that is not the same fucking thing AT ALL.

Tumblr the company may be getting money out of this deal but you KNOW (and Tumblr corporate: if you don't see this coming, you're fucking dipshits) Midjourney/OpenAI is going to use them as an excuse and rope them into any lawsuits regarding the matter. So that's probably a net loss for you, Tumblr? You know? Have you considered that?

You COULD just say, hey. The website is constantly in debt and we need to raise $30M in user sponsorships or else the site is going down at the end of the year. But instead you're like, "actually, I think I'd prefer to take a cattleprod up my ass"

[null-version-nova]

hey btw all. ill probably still post here unless shit goes completely pear-shaped but judging by the trajectory things are going, i do have a cohost!

so follow me there too. if i get enough mutuals there i might start posting there a lot as well as here.

(for context tumblrs ceo just banned a trans person for explicit content and harassment [there was not that much explicit content, and basically no harassment] and proceeded to start spreading rumors about that person in other peoples dms. this action leaves automattic vulnerable to a discrimination lawsuit so im looking into new options LOL)