Twitter threatens to sue Meta over Threads platform
Twitter has threatened to sue Meta Platforms over its new Threads platform in a letter despatched to the Facebook mother or father’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Twitter’s lawyer Alex Spiro.
Meta, which launched Threads on Wednesday and has logged greater than 30 million signal ups, seems to tackle Elon Musk’s Twitter by leveraging Instagram’s billions of customers.
Spiro, in his letter, accused Meta of hiring former Twitter staff who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” News web site Semafor first reported.
“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,” Spiro wrote within the letter.
A Reuters supply with information of the letter confirmed its contents on Thursday. Spiro didn’t reply to a Reuters request for remark.
“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone mentioned in a Threads put up.
A former senior Twitter worker advised Reuters they weren’t conscious of any former staffers engaged on Threads, nor any senior personnel who landed at Meta in any respect.
Meanwhile, Twitter proprietor Musk mentioned, “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” in response to a tweet citing the news.
Meta owns Instagram in addition to Facebook.
Since Musk’s takeover of the social media platform final October, Twitter has obtained competitors from Mastodon and Bluesky amongst others. Threads’ person interface, nonetheless, resembles the microblogging platform.
Still, Threads doesn’t help key phrase searches or direct messages.
To press a commerce secret theft declare towards Meta, Twitter would want rather more element than what is within the letter, mentioned mental property legislation specialists together with Stanford legislation professor Mark Lemley.
“The mere hiring of former Twitter employees (who Twitter itself laid off or drove away) and the fact that Facebook created a somewhat similar site is unlikely to support a trade secrets claim,” he mentioned.
Jeanne Fromer, a professor at New York University, mentioned firms alleging commerce secret theft should present they made cheap efforts to guard their company secrets and techniques. Cases typically revolve round safe programs that have been circumvented ultimately.
The latest problem to Twitter follows a sequence of chaotic choices which have alienated each customers and advertisers, together with Musk’s newest transfer to restrict the variety of tweets customers can learn per day.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram, Tiyashi Datta in Bengaluru, and by Jody Godoy and Katie Paul in New York; Editing by Shailesh Kuber and Josie Kao)
