Twitter threatens to do cause a Meta for his new Threads app, that Mark Zuckerberg has openly named it as a rival, claiming the company violated the "intellectual property rights" of the social media it bought from Elon Musk. A few hours after the launch of Threads, Alex Spiro, legal representative of the bird's social media, sent a letter to the CEO of the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, accusing the company of "systematic, intentional and illegal misappropriation of secrets of Twitter and other intellectual property,” threatening legal action against Meta and accusing the company of “poaching former employees” for creating a sort of “clone” of the popular social network.
Meta launched Threads, a text-based conversation app that intends to compete with Twitter, garnered 24 million subscriptions on Wednesday and in less than 30 hours, making it the fastest downloaded app ever. “This is the best start we could have hoped for!” Zuckerberg said in a Thursday thread. And Twitter goes on the counterattack and threatens to sue Meta.
The cease and desist letter
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and requests Meta to take immediate action to stop using Twitter's trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Attorney Spiro wrote in the cease and desist letter. Not only that, the attorney claims Meta has recruited dozens of former employees over the past year, some of whom "have had and continue to have access to Twitter trade secrets and other highly confidential information" and "many" of whom have stored "improperly" documents or electronic devices of the platform owned by Elon Musk.
"With this awareness - continues the letter - Meta has deliberately assigned these employees the task of developing, within a few months, theimitation app Meta's 'Threads', with the specific intent to use Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property to accelerate development of Meta's competitor app, in violation of state and federal laws and these employees' obligations to Twitter ”. The letter also notifies Meta that “it is expressly prohibited to engage in any scanning or scraping of Twitter followers or follower data […]. Scraping of any Twitter service is expressly prohibited for any reason without Twitter's prior consent." Despite this, the letter of formal notice does not claim that Meta has carried out such activities.
“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk tweeted on Thursday.
Meta's response to Twitter's allegations
In response to the letter, Meta's director of communications, Andy Stone, wrote on Threads that there are no engineers on the team who used to work for Twitter.
It is not clear which ones evidence has Musk's app to prove that former employees who now work for Meta continue to have access to Twitter's intellectual property or trade secrets.
A search on LinkedIn conducted by the Guardian, however, found several former Twitter employees hired in the last year by the Menlo Park company. However, it is quite common for employees in the technology sector to jump from one company to another, especially if they have worked in a social media platform.
