Comment by DannyBee
1 day ago
Lawyer here-100% agree. Calling this a win is super super strange. The only claims that were dismissed were long shots anyway and will just be amended except for extortion.
The court didn’t even find that there wasn’t extortion, just that you can’t privately sue over the kind of extortion claimed here. Which means California could actually still sue over it, just not WPEngine.
Amusingly, the court also refused to take judicial notice of several documents Automattic submitted because WPEngine said they were not authentic copies of the documents.
Overall this is emphatically not a win. They knocked out roughly no interesting claims, knocked out zero claims permanently (the one claim that can’t be amended could still be sued over by California, and they actually might because it’s California), and will have just made themselves work arguing the same claims again once amended.
They will still end up in trial in 2027 or 2028.
The only usefulness of this would have been as a delaying tactic but I don’t see how that benefits Automattic given the PR disaster they made of this
It's only super strange if you have no knowledge of who Matt is. Poor attempts at misdirection is his status quo.
> U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, a Joe Biden appointee, denied Automattic and Mullenweg’s bid to strike or dismiss claims including defamation, trade libel, unjust enrichment and intentional interference with contractual and economic relations claims.
The whole thing has been quite entertaining as a disinterested party who has no stake in any of it. I’ve been considering putting a couple of sites back up that used to run on WP. I’m firmly in the static-site-generator camp if I decide to do so to reduce the cost of AI scraping, but our friend Matt sure gave me a reason to replace WP regardless.
Edit: forgot the link.
https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-grants-partial-motion-t...
Plus one on the static site generation. Especially now with AI, it's such a better experience and so much easier than it used to be, plus you'll get the huge performance and security benefits etc.
The only use case for WordPress is when you've very non-technical people needing to edit the site's content - a very common and natural situation since most are marketing sites - but even in that case I'd see if Wix could get the job done rather than rigging up a WordPress.
you could always use any cms/non-SSG and cache the pages on your webserver or, better yet, CDN. This would essentially be SSG + bells and whistles that make your life easier.
Modus operandi, maybe?
They still have to do business. Maybe he wants to portray this until the case is seen to calm down users and clients of his companies...
Why do these cases take so long? Is it due to the "American rule", that encourages lawyers slowing everything down to rack up huge billings?
Thanks for that informative analysis and extra details!