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.
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.
> 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.
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)"?
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.
The trademark policy sounds like it falls somewhere between the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation model and the Red Hat/Fedora Project model. This is how open source in practice works.
Not really. The Mozilla Corporation and Red Hat aren't direct 1:1 commercial competitors to the people they also license the trademarks to (as is the case with Automattic and WPEngine). It's an obvious conflict of interest and inherently problematic on so many levels.
If there is a real-world open-source analogue to that situation, I'd be genuinely interested in hearing about it.
To me the solution seems simple; The WP Foundation should own and license the trademark. Then use the proceeds for its mission in a way that is accountable to the community (Automattic should not have to pay of course).
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.
> But pushing Apple to make iOS available on other phone hardware
Wait where are you getting this from?
> While the announcement is a step shy of being a formal investigation, the EU aims to compel Apple to re-engineer its services to allow rival companies to access the iPhone’s operating system. One of the aims of the DMA is to ensure that other developers can gain access to key iPhone features, such as its Siri voice commands and its payments chip.
It sounds more like pushing Apple to open some APIs and allow for some more integrations, which seems much more reasonable than your interpretation.
I had interpreted “the EU aims to compel Apple to re-engineer its services to allow rival companies to access the iPhone’s operating system” to mean that they want other phone manufacturers to be able to install iOS on their phones. I agree that your interpretation is much more reasonable.
Finally someone is doing something about Apple's abusive practices.
The support of abusive monopolistic practices around here is something else though. Temporarily-embarrassed-tech-billionaire syndrome is the only explanation.
1) Ego/Power trip reasons: It just makes you feel like the big man to be physically lording over your minions and they miss it.
2) Class Warfare: Workers need to be kept miserable enough so they turn to mindless consumption and don't start asking any inconvenient questions.
3) Financial Conflicts of Interest: Higher Management is likely to have some real estate investments, maybe even in commercial real estate. They might be worried more about that part of their portfolio than about the company stock part.
X and US law both have rules against incitement of imminent violence. It's one of the only exceptions to the First Amendment. X extends that to making violent threats in general. Those accounts were doing the latter and sometimes the former.
The @vps_reports account named in the first tweet in your story is a good example. The Intercept claims they were suspended for engaging in "journalism", "organizing" and "documenting extremism". X claims they were suspended for making violent threats.
If we follow links a bit further we see what sort of tweets @vps_reports was making:
> "One last thing. ChayaRaichik10 should live in fear for the rest of her days. It's only fair. Put the PHOBIA in her transphobia."
(there are several more examples like that)
It's not surprising that such people would fall afoul of an anti-threat rule if enforced fairly. Pre-Musk, people like that could make violent threats on Twitter, or even coordinate mob violence there, as long as they were threatening right wing people. Musk fixed that. The Intercept is being dishonest.
I've never actually understood the difference, curious if you can help fill in a few blanks for me.
How is expression different than speech here? Is a European really free to express themselves when they are limited to expression that the government approves (or hasn't banned)?
It feels like a lazy attempt at rebranding speech so they can claim its free...with government restrictions.
You are free to express your opinions ("I don't like immigrants from Africa"), but you are not free to choose any manner of speech, as there's restrictions in certain areas, such as hate speech or inciting violence ("Kill the N-words!")
It seems like that would allow someone in Germany to say "I think the Nazis were 100% right in what they did to the Jews", though my understanding is that would be very much illegal under German law.
Similarly, would it be illegal to say "Kill the N-words!" but not "I think all the N-words should be killed!"?
Obvious caveat - this is a highly contentious topic. Thank you for helping me better understand European laws specifically. For anyone passing by, I'm obviously not condoning the opinions of the example statements above.
Actually, that's why there's judge to interpret the Law
In Europe, in general (and that's something that look a bit strange to US it seem), we judge on THE SPIRIT of the Law more than on THE TEXT. So a European court would surely consider "hate speech" independantly of how it is phrased exactly
However "I think the Nazis were 100% right in what they did to the Jews" is IMHO NOT "hate speech" but an opinion. What would be "hate speech" would be more "We have to kill the XXXXXX" (insert any race, color, religion, sex....) or "All the XXX must die" (different phrasing, same idea).
"Hate speech" is, well, spreading hate against some people. The judge will decide case by case. Example: some humorist have some racists jokes but the context will make clear if it "hate speech" (1st degree) or "humor" (2nd degree)
This has always been a huge hangup for me with laws in general. If a law isn't clearly spelled out enough to be able to know when I would be in the wrong before I act (or speak), I'm effectively at the whims of the legal system and I can't avoid it.
The idea that two reasonable people can so easily read the examples I gave as hate speech or free expression of opinion feels very wrong. Laws should be much more clear if they are meant to actually serve in the best interests of the public.
It certainly is a lot more ambiguous than absolute free speech, yes. I think your example would still count as hate speech inciting violence against black people. The Nazi one I'm not sure off the top of my head, to be honest.
Because he's a huge hypocrite and only uses the excuse of free speech to enable right wing radicals, while not granting it to anyone he disagrees with.
What state were they restored to? If they were accessible, why did they have to be restored?
If you're going to argue "a ban doesn't count if it's reversed after a couple of hours", what's the threshold? Could Elon ban people for a week without it counting as a ban? What if it happens repeatedly?
If these accounts were banned due to censorship they'd have stayed banned. There are plenty of accounts that were shut down on Twitter that are still disabled today.
And you know that how exactly? Do you work at Twitter? Are you responsible for banning/restoring accounts?
You're making broad statements and assumptions that don't align with reality. The accounts were banned. You don't know why they were banned or restored.
I actually did work on account suspensions and abuse handling at Google, and after I left I visited Twitter and gave them a talk about bot fighting techniques, so yeah. I don't know these accounts specifically but have worked in that field and know the signs.
It doesn't matter if you've worked on this at a different company, especially considering how much Musk changed about Twitter. You either know the reasons they were banned and restored or you don't - it's disingenuous to claim that a) they weren't banned, and b) to claim you know that the reasons definitely aren't XYZ.
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