On September 24 Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín decided the motions to dismiss that had been under submission in WP Engine’s lawsuit against Automattic since June. The seventeen-page order revives four antitrust claims she had thrown out in an earlier ruling, and buried in its last page is a holding that matters to every hosting company that has ever been asked to pay for the WordPress name.

The court dismissed Automattic’s and Matt Mullenweg’s trademark counterclaims “to the extent Mullenweg and Automattic purport to assert them in their own right.” The reason is that they are “neither owners nor registrants of the marks at issue,” and do not hold “a truly exclusive license that grants all substantial trademark rights, including the ability to exclude the licensor from using the marks.” It does not say who does own them. The WordPress Foundation, one of the four counterclaimants, owns the WordPress marks and licenses commercial rights to Automattic.

Key facts

  • The reversal: Counts 11 to 14, two monopolization claims and two tying claims, are back. The judge had dismissed them herself in an earlier ruling.
  • The counterclaims: most survive. Trademark Counts 1 and 3 to 5 are dismissed only so far as Automattic and Mullenweg assert them in their own right.
  • What WP Engine lost: its Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claim is dismissed without leave to amend, and a declaratory count goes without prejudice.
  • What is next: a sanctions hearing on September 30 in Oakland, then a ten-day jury trial from October 19, 2027.

Who May Sue on the WordPress Marks, and Who May Not

Automattic, Mullenweg, WooCommerce and the WordPress Foundation filed seven counterclaims in October 2025, alleging that WP Engine infringed the WordPress and WooCommerce marks. WP Engine moved to dismiss all seven. The order denies that motion almost entirely: the counterclaims survive, and the court says questions of laches, nominative fair use and whether the marks were famous are “factual issues not suitable for resolution at this stage.”

The exception is who may bring them. On the trademark counts the court applies the ordinary rule that only an owner, a registrant or the holder of a truly exclusive license can sue, and finds that Automattic and Mullenweg are none of those. The trademark claims continue. Automattic and Mullenweg simply cannot assert them in their own right.

For a hosting company the practical reading is narrow and worth being precise about. This is a pleading-stage ruling about who may assert a claim in court. It does not decide whether anyone infringed anything, and it does not by itself invalidate a licensing demand. What it does establish is that Automattic, which pursued WP Engine over WordPress trademark licensing in September 2024, cannot assert these trademark claims in its own right. Summarizing the complaint, the order records the allegation that “Defendants targeted multi-million-dollar deals with at least 11 competitors.”

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The Footnote Where the Judge Changes Her Mind

The antitrust reversal is announced in a single sentence of footnote two: “The Court previously dismissed WPEngine’s antitrust claims and departs from its prior order, now finding WPEngine’s antitrust claims viable.” What returns is Count 11, monopolization under section 2 of the Sherman Act, Count 12, attempted monopolization, Count 13, illegal tying under section 1, and Count 14, tying under California’s Cartwright Act.

Automattic had argued that WP Engine could not plausibly plead a single-brand aftermarket, market power, antitrust injury, anticompetitive conduct or unlawful tying. The order works through those in order and denies the motion on each. The market question it treats as the threshold one, since “accurately defining the relevant market is a threshold step in any antitrust case,” and it accepts that a relevant market can be “an aftermarket in which demand depends entirely upon prior purchases in a foremarket.”

That is the legal frame for what hosting companies watched happen in the autumn of 2024. The theory WP Engine may now pursue, subject to summary judgment next year, is that control of WordPress.org was used to raise rivals’ costs and to condition access on terms a competitor could not accept.

The License Demand Was Not Extortion Under the CFAA

The order is not one-sided, and the part WP Engine lost is the part a hosting company should read next. Its Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claim, Count 3, is dismissed without leave to amend, which ends it. That claim rested on the theory that the licensing demand of September 2024, and the threats to cut off access that came with it, amounted to extortion.

The court rejects it on the merits of the theory rather than on a technicality. WP Engine did not plausibly allege “that it had a preexisting right to access and use WordPress.org or related trademarks in perpetuity for free.” Because the defendants were seeking payment for services that have some “objective value,” they had a lawful claim to what they were asking for, so the licensing demand was not extortionate conduct of the kind the statute reaches. Nor were their threats to suspend access, the court citing the Ninth Circuit’s endorsement of the view that “hard bargaining does not amount to extortion.”

Count 7, a declaratory judgment of non-dilution sought against WooCommerce, goes without prejudice. The false-advertising portion of Automattic’s second counterclaim is dismissed with leave to amend.

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Tomorrow’s Hearing Is About Something Else Entirely

On September 30 at 1:30 PM in Oakland, Magistrate Judge Ajay Krishnan hears WP Engine’s motion for sanctions over evidence preservation, docket 357, filed July 28. That motion asks the court to find that Mullenweg’s messages on WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram were lost after a duty to keep them had attached, and to instruct a jury to presume the contents would have hurt the defendants. Automattic’s answer is that WP Engine “cannot identify one, not a message, not a conversation, not a counterparty.”

One of the things that motion asks for is dismissal of the same seven counterclaims, as a sanction. Those counterclaims have now survived an ordinary motion to dismiss, so the sanctions motion is the next pending route by which WP Engine seeks their dismissal. The other is summary judgment, whose opening motion is due in November.

Nothing else changes tomorrow. The preliminary injunction of December 10, 2024, which restored WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org and returned the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, runs until judgment. The ten-day jury trial is set for October 19, 2027, three years after the complaint was filed. Eight days before the sanctions hearing, on September 22, seven Gibson Dunn lawyers withdrew for the defendants and a Susman Godfrey team was admitted in their place.

About the Data

The holdings, the quoted language and the count numbers come from the order itself, docket 410, read in full. The docket entries, the September 22 counsel changes and the absence of any order vacating tomorrow’s hearing come from the public docket for case 4:24-cv-06917, read on September 29, which warns that it may lag the court’s own records. The sanctions motion and Automattic’s answer are quoted from the filings, the October 2027 trial date from the scheduling order of September 11. The Foundation’s ownership of the marks is from our earlier reporting, not from this order. Neither party was contacted.