Twitter has threatened to sue Meta for infringing on Twitter’s “intellectual property rights” with its new Threads app, which Mark Zuckerberg has openly referred to as a competitor.
A lawyer for Twitter stated in a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which was originally published by the news outlet Semafor, that the firm “has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (Meta) has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” wrote Alex Spiro in the letter.
Threads, a text-based chat software aimed at competing with Twitter, was released on Wednesday to generally positive reviews. Threads reportedly received 30 million sign-ups in less than 24 hours of launch, making it the fastest-downloaded software ever. Threads accounts are linked to Instagram profiles, making the signup process smooth between apps and providing the Twitter clone with an existing user base.
Threads, according to Zuckerberg, was Meta’s attempt to construct a “public conversations app with 1 billion+ people,” an opportunity that Twitter “hasn’t nailed.”
“This is as good of a start as we could have hoped for!” On Thursday, Zuckerberg stated in a thread.
Twitter claims in the cease-and-desist letter that Meta has hired dozens of previous staff members in the last year, some of whom “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information” and “many” of whom “improperly” kept Twitter documents or electronic devices.
“With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter,” according to the letter.
“Competition is fine, but cheating is not,” Musk said in a tweet on Thursday.
In response to the letter, Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, stated on Threads that the staff that used to work at Twitter does not include any engineers.
It’s unclear what proof Twitter has that former workers who now work at Meta have continued access to Twitter intellectual property or trade secrets. Twitter responded to a comment request with an automated email containing a feces emoji.
Meta was also “prohibited” from collecting data from any Twitter service, according to Twitter. Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, has recently made many actions to ostensibly minimize any attempts to scrape Twitter data, including limiting the number of tweets users may see in a day. Musk stated at the time that it was in response to corporations utilizing Twitter to train their AI models.
The Guardian ran a short LinkedIn search and discovered many Meta staffers who previously worked at Twitter. However, it is normal for tech personnel to go from one company to another, especially if they previously worked at a social networking platform.
In the tech business, the threat of a lawsuit for trade secret appropriation is not without precedent or consequence. In 2018, for example, Google-owned self-driving vehicle firm Waymo sued Uber for stealing trade secrets after a top executive at Waymo resigned to join Uber’s attempts to develop its own self-driving technology. Google and Uber eventually agreed on a $245 million settlement. Anthony Levandowski, the employee in question, was eventually convicted with theft of trade secrets and sentenced to 18 months in federal prison, which he did not spend since he was pardoned by former President Donald Trump.
