Are you certain your vote was counted and not lost? I vote in person because I know when I mail things they don't always get where I intended them to be (and especially when there is a deadline in place)
In my country, I can just bring the letter and put it in a special mailbox in the city hall in the weeks before the vote. I would trust the mail system, too, but that's beside the point.
In my case I complete my ballot ahead of time and drop it in a ballot box, which are distributed around my city. Then I get an email from my county clerk when my ballot has been counted.
I think the concern about things getting lost in the mail is reasonable, but is a separate issue; the mail system is supposed to be a highly trustworthy distribution system for sensitive documents. Hell, it's how you get your passport. That's why it's a state department (in the US, anyway) in the first place: it's an essential government function to have a communications channel with a given citizen.
I've been concerned about cuts made to the USPS leading up to the previous election, both because of the obvious impact on the USPS's ability to handle election materials, but also because of the potential impact on the arrival of other essential, time-sensitive documents. (Not essential, but my mother's anniversary card to myself and my partner fully bounced this year, after three weeks in transit. We only live 130 miles apart.)
My point is: threat models that center on the mail system somehow being unreliable are a valid concern, but missing the point.
Yeah. I foresee a possible hilarious outcome here.
Matt wins this case, having the court determine the trademarks are "worth" so much that WPEngine - one out of thousands of WP hosting companies - owes licence fees of 10mil per year. Lets ballpark that at a billion dollar a year in licence fees worth of revenue, maybe 5 or 10 billion value.
The IRS then steps in and "Al Capones" Matt and Automattic for tax evasion by moving billions of dollars of assets between a non profit and a for profit company without disclosing or paying tax on it. IRS wins punitive damages, wipes out every company asset Matt's ever been involved with.
WPEngine and Silver Lake buy the remains of these companies (including the trademarks) at fire sale prices.
WPEngine isn't just one out of thousands of WP hosting companies. They're an absolute juggernaut dwarfing everyone else.
It's like saying AWS is one of dozens of cloud providers. The sad thing is that there are FAR BETTER WP hosting services out there, like Pantheon.io, and the majority of the WordPress community does not even know that they exist.
I think it was explained elsewhere, but Automattic has the commercial trademark rights, so licensing money wouldn’t be transferred to a non-profit foundation.
Yeah, but according to the filing, Matt had Automattic transfer the ownership of the trademarks to the foundation, they had the foundation grant the exclusive licence back to Automattic.
If those trademarks are asserted to be worth billions, there are presumably reporting and tax obligations for both the ownership transfer and the licence grant agreement.
Automattic: Owns the commercial right to use and sell the license
This is done because the WordPress Foundation is non-profit. The legal intricacies of this have been worked out a long time ago. You want to use the WordPress license? Then you'll have to buy it from Automattic.
At first the idea that a $1000/hr associate planted a typo or two intentionally made me laugh but the more I think about it the more I think that's exactly what someone playing 4D chess with a lawsuit like this might do.
I doubt it. I've been involved with a similarly priced law firm once for an investment in a company I had a small stake in. They misspelled the names of multiple people, fixed it in the next draft version after it was pointed out to them, and then had it pop back up in some of the names a few versions later.
I know more than I'd like to about this topic; I spent most of a decade supporting legal document management systems.
Large law firms use document management systems[0] to store their documents. It's a really primitive VCS that integrates with Microsoft Office. The user who checks out a document usually has exclusive access to it until it's checked back in. Other people can check out a copy of the same document, but it won't usually contain any changes the other person made. There's additional work required and many users don't know how to do this. It's common for changes to be lost or a partner to have the help desk unlock documents. I'm guessing that's what happened in this case.
Yeah it's probably more likely they just need to bill 80 hours a week or whatever amount not to get fired and were going too fast to notice the error :)
As I write many more things collaborating with people who do not speak English as a first language, it is more obvious than ever that grammar and spelling errors have absolutely no correlation with the quality of the argument when it comes to professional communication.
At some level sure, but if a lawyer is typing a 30 page document in a few hours, they might have someone proofread it once but I guarantee you the thought that went into writing it was far more serious than the thought that went into proofreading it.
Do you put the typo next to the thing you want to hide to distract the opposition or do you put the typo miles away to draw their attention to something irrelevant?
I can't tell if this is sarcasm but it made me burst out loud and it's probably the funniest thing I've read all week.
Red herrings? People actually believe lawyers set up a 9D chess game in court and move pieces by making typos to distract from facts ?
Lawyers are humans too. I know a bunch of oldies who still don't use a spell checker or anything. They just eyeball it or have associates do it. If you make typos, you fix them on subsequent revisions. If not, too bad.
I love how he explains that “consideration” was conjured from thin air.
I own a car. I want to drive my own car on weekdays. To accomplish this, I give my car to Jimmy, and he promises to let me use it on weekdays?
Using the same analogy as in that post, apparently this is a valid contract with “consideration” because I gave Jimmy my car and, “in return,” he gave me my car back Monday–Friday.
I’m no lawyer, but I can’t imagine that it is illegal to donate a noncommercial license to a nonprofit organization, without contracts and considerations coming into play. But if I’m wrong, and “consideration” is a required element of a transaction like this, I don’t think this wash-sale version of it would pass muster anyway.
I also do not get it, I don't know why consideration is even relevant for a donation.
I assume someone wanted to restructure things so that a fully owned trademark was owned by a non-profit instead, with them retaining commercial rights.
Why would either side want to minimize the donation size? It reduces taxes for the commercial company and the non-profit doesn't care about income tax.
I don't know if the site is accurate but it's odd to bring up considerations for sure. I don't see anything immoral or unethical about want to restructure so that a non-profit handles the non-profit stuff.
There are so many legal entities here that appear completely intertwined: The WordPress Foundation, Automattic, Audrey Capital, WordPress Community Support PBC, etc. Conflicts of interest are a problem even if they aren't acted upon. It's going to get ugly.
the statements about the non-profit situation seem especially bad. He'll obviously have his own side of the story, but I'm guessing they didn't misread the tax filings.
I am surprised that the Chevron case and this have not overlapped
I thought the outcome of Chevron being overturned (I.e. “3-letter-agencies can no longer unilaterally make laws”) would have come up here as well, since the FTC is part of the Executive Branch
(Not trying to comment on the underlying case. Don’t care to argue for or against NCs)
The overturning of Chevron doesn’t prevent executive branch agencies from unilaterally making law (in the form of legally binding regulations) through the Administrative Procedure Act process if they stay within one of Congress’s statutory grants of authority. “Unilaterally” is not the same thing as “immune to judicial review” or “entitled to automatic judicial deference”.
What Chevron previously said is that, if the scope of the statutory grant of authority was ambiguous and the agency’s interpretation of that ambiguity was reasonable, then the court must defer to the agency’s interpretation. That requirement is now gone.
Without the Chevron rule, courts will still uphold a regulation that was clearly statutorily authorized under the same conditions as when Chevron was good law, and they will still overturn regulations that were clearly not authorized by statute just as they did under Chevron.
For ambiguous cases, the court now independently reaches their own judicial finding of law, just as they would if deciding whether a statute passed by Congress is authorized by the Constitution. Of course, courts still can and will give due consideration to the opinion of the agency and their subject-matter experts, just as they would consider the briefs and evidence from all parties to any dispute. Only the automatic deference which Chevron sometimes required is gone.
Regarding the FTC non-compete rule, neither court ruling relied on Chevron. One court found the relevant statutory authority to be sufficient through their own independent judicial analysis rather than through Chevron deference, and one found it to be insufficient (a finding which never involved Chevron deference).
> For ambiguous cases, the court now independently reaches their own judicial finding of law, just as they would if deciding whether a statute passed by Congress is authorized by the Constitution.
Does this mean that, in ambiguous cases, judges wind up in a position where their judicial expertise takes precedence over the technical expertise behind the statues?
First of all, courts aren’t ruling on the merits of regulations, only on whether they were enacted with valid authority and following the correct procedure (including not being arbitrary and capricious). And the overturning of Chevron has nothing to do with how courts handle technical expertise behind statutes - it’s only about adjudicating the validity of regulations, not of statutes.
So the rest of my comment discusses the case when opinions from a regulatory agency’s technical experts are somehow relevant to whether a regulation is valid and not just to the regulation’s merits or lack thereof.
Judges are still either encouraged or expected (I forget which) to give due respect to the agency’s technical experts, based on pre-Chevron precedents. They’re definitely not forbidden from doing so.
But for example, what if the challenger also presents technical expert opinions which run counter to the argument of the agency’s expert?
Under Chevron, the court had no authority to conclude that the challenger’s expert-informed argument was more likely to be right than the agency’s expert-informed argument when both arguments are reasonable.
Now that Chevron is overturned, the court does have that authority. Just like in every other case outside the former scope of Chevron where one or both of the parties presents expert opinions to the court.
That’s it.
Honestly, overturning Chevron is mainly as impactful as it is because Congress isn’t sufficiently active at legislatively clarifying its vague statutory grants of regulatory authority or removing some of the more important substantive decisions from the whims of frequently changing executive branch administrations. In a parliamentary system where the government is supported by a legislative majority, both the laws and the regulations can be adjusted as needed, not just the regulations.
But isn't the overturning of Chevron itself an example of the Court ignoring the authorizations of Congress? Congress delegated the authority to agencies to make regulations.
> Congress delegated the authority to agencies to make regulations.
It did and it didn't.
As parent was saying, Congress generally created each executive agency through a specific authorizing act, that also contained what it should do and its powers.
Chevron (or its overturning) has to do with what happens when that authorization was ambiguous.
Previously (Chevron), courts had to defer to the agency. Now they don't.
Neither of which changes what courts have to do when the authorization is not ambiguous. Which is a lot of times.
You can always imagine an ambiguity into existence. Chevron deference meant that wasn't enough and now it is. Human natural languages are naturally ambiguous. This Supreme Court ruling encourages courts, especially Right-leaning courts to just declare that oops, this text was ambiguous and so even though it's obvious to any normal person that Congress did intend exactly the regulation at issue, a court can argue it isn't sure they meant that and so the regulations have no effect until Congress finds the time to spell it out to the court's satisfaction, which may be never.
The bigger problem is that as judges find more and more tortured ways to fit their ideology onto the raw text this is further destroying trust in the justice system which erodes not just the republic, which presumably Republicans no longer give a shit about, but the United States of America itself, the country. Even an Autocrat needs that trust, the US isn't Monaco, it cannot be managed without a vast bureaucracy.
What's notable about the present Supreme Court isn't that they're partisans, that's inevitable under the US system for decades at least. What's notable is that they're not very good judges. Scalia wasn't great but he was smarter than several of the newer justices which is at least something. And Thomas is a joke, if this man was on my magistrates bench I'd have him kicked out.
When is the last time you saw a US Supreme Court decision which articulates a good principle of justice and uses that to explain the decision such that it seems in hindsight obvious and inevitable? There should be several of these each season, ideally the vast majority of decisions. Instead we get tortured logic and the sort of dubious attempts at reinterpreting somebody else's words by ignoring their plain meaning that would get you a poor grade in an undergraduate essay. This means more work for the justices, further over-burdening a system that is failing.
Take Obergefell. The dissents are pretty stupid, but even the Kennedy decision is poor work, if this gets a passing grade in BA Law the lecturer is too generous. Yes, James Obergefell ultimately deserved at least what this decision gave him, but the decision can't bring itself to articulate a core principle to explain that. If the Supreme Court can't or won't take such a stance, why even have one?
I understand your take here, but I fail to see how this is really a rebuttal?
Congress has the ability to change the authorizing act if they believe that an agency is acting incorrectly when authorization is ambiguous.
If they do not do so - I would read that as congress intends the agency to act in the manner they are acting.
The court is now saying that failure to act is not a decision in itself, and that the courts are now allowed to decide - That feels like a fairly blatant power grab.
Why must congress be forced to continually act if the agency is making decisions it believes reasonable under the authorizations it granted? There will never be a law that lacks ambiguity - it's just not possible.
This is ridiculous and completely the political factors and personal financial stakes of the justices involved.
Chevron deference was in place for decades and congress steadily created more agencies and passed laws to restrict or add powers. If congress wanted Chevron deference gone, they had literal decades to have fixed it.
Are you certain your vote was counted and not lost? I vote in person because I know when I mail things they don't always get where I intended them to be (and especially when there is a deadline in place)
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