Twitter threatens to sue Meta over Threads platform
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[July 07, 2023] By
Jody Godoy
(Reuters) -Twitter has threatened to sue Meta Platforms over its new
Threads platform in a letter sent to the Facebook parent's CEO Mark
Zuckerberg by Twitter's lawyer Alex Spiro.
Meta, which launched Threads on Wednesday and has logged more than 30
million sign ups, looks to take on Elon Musk's Twitter by leveraging
Instagram's billions of users.
Spiro, in his letter, accused Meta of hiring former Twitter employees
who "had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and
other highly confidential information," News website 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 in
the letter.
A Reuters source with knowledge of the letter confirmed its contents on
Thursday. Spiro did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
"No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee —
that's just not a thing," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a Threads
post.
A former senior Twitter employee told Reuters they were not aware of any
former staffers working on Threads, nor any senior personnel who landed
at Meta at all.
Meanwhile, Twitter owner Musk said, "Competition is fine, cheating is
not," in response to a tweet citing the news.
Meta owns Instagram as well as Facebook.
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Meta Threads and Twitter app logos are
seen in this illustration taken, July 6, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
Since Musk's takeover of the social media platform last October,
Twitter has received competition from Mastodon and Bluesky among
others. Threads' user interface, however, resembles the
microblogging platform.
Still, Threads does not support keyword searches or direct messages.
To press a trade secret theft claim against Meta, Twitter would need
much more detail than what is in the letter, said intellectual
property law experts including Stanford law 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 said.
Jeanne Fromer, a professor at New York University, said companies
alleging trade secret theft must show they made reasonable efforts
to protect their corporate secrets. Cases often revolve around
secure systems that were circumvented in some way.
The newest challenge to Twitter follows a series of chaotic
decisions that have alienated both users and advertisers, including
Musk's latest move to limit the number of tweets users can read 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)
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