Twitter says Threads stole its IP, sends legal threat to Facebook parent Meta
Twitter has sent a legal warning to competitor Meta, Semafor said. July 6th.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, previously released a Threads app. The product has been widely described as a Twitter competitor, or a “Twitter killer”, a point Twitter itself has noted.
Twitter attorney Alex Spiro wrote to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg after the platform launched. The letter called Threads a “copycat” app and said:
“Based on recent reports about your recently launched Threads app, Twitter does not believe that Meta is involved in the systematic, intentional, or unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets or other intellectual property. I have serious concerns.”
Spiro also alleged that Meta intentionally hired a number of former Twitter employees. Spiro claimed those employees used trade secrets and inside information to advance Thread’s development. Spiro said these actions violated both state and federal law, as well as the employee’s ongoing obligations to Twitter.
Spiro’s letter added that Twitter is committed to “strictly enforcing its intellectual property rights” and called on Meta to stop using trade secrets and confidential information originating from Twitter. Spiro warned that Twitter reserves the right to take legal action, including both civil and injunctive relief, to prevent further use of its IP.
Other officials also commented on the matter. Elon Musk, Twitter’s CTO and executive chairman, implicitly endorsed the legal threat in a July 6 tweet.he I have written: “Competition is good, cheating is bad.”
Andy Stone, communications director at Meta, denied the allegations. He clarified to Semafor that there are no former Twitter employees on the Threads team.
Twitter is in widespread trouble
Twitter put a rate limit on viewable content a few days before the meta thread was published. said this limit Implemented to limit bot activity.
The company didn’t say it imposed restrictions in anticipation of Threads’ launch. But Spiro’s letter tells Meta to refrain from scraping or crawling Twitter data, suggesting that the two concerns are at least adjacent to each other.
Twitter has experienced a number of other controversies since Elon Musk acquired the company in October 2022. Certain issues, particularly lax content policies that some claim to condone hate speech, have prompted users to move to decentralized social media alternatives such as Mastodon.
Some crypto hopefuls believe that the backlash against Twitter could benefit Web3 and other blockchain-based social networks such as Peepeth, Lens Protocol and Damus.
