Twitter has threatened to sue its rival Threads app Meta Twitter

Twitter has threatened to sue Meta over its new lines The app, which Mark Zuckerberg has overtly billed as a rival, claims the corporate has violated Twitter’s “mental property rights.”

In a letter to the CEO Mark Zuckerbergfirst printed By news outlet Semafora lawyer for Twitter mentioned the corporate has “critical considerations that Meta Platforms (Meta) has engaged in systematic, willful and illegal misappropriation of Twitter’s commerce secrets and techniques and different mental property”.

“Twitter intends to strictly implement its mental property rights, and calls for that Meta take instant motion to cease any such use. Twitter commerce secrets and techniques or different extremely confidential data,” Alex Spiro wrote within the letter.

Meta Started topica text-based chat app that goals to rival Twitter, on Wednesday Mostly positive reception. The corporate mentioned Threads garnered 24 million signups in lower than 30 hours after launch, apparently making it the fastest-downloaded app ever. Threads accounts are linked to Instagram profiles, making the method seamless between apps and giving Twitter copycats a built-in consumer base.

Zuckerberg said Threads was Meta’s try and take a shot at making a “public dialog app with 1bn+ individuals” – a chance that Twitter had however “did not capitalize on”.

“That is nearly as good a begin as we might have hoped for!” Zuckerberg mentioned in a thread on Thursday.

Twitter claims to have the ability to take away and delete it Meta Previously 12 months, it has pursued dozens of former workers, a few of whom “had and continued to have entry to Twitter’s commerce secrets and techniques and different extremely confidential data” and “many” who “misappropriated” Twitter paperwork or digital gadgets. is the.

“With this information, Meta knowingly assigned these workers to develop, over a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the particular intent that they use Twitter’s commerce secrets and techniques and different mental property to to speed up the event of a competing app, in violation of each state and federal regulation, in addition to these workers’ ongoing obligations on Twitter,” the letter reads.

“Competitors is OK, dishonest just isn’t,” Musk tweeted on Thursday.

In response to the letter, Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, Posted on topic There isn’t any engineer within the workforce who used to work at Twitter.

It is unclear what proof Twitter has that former workers who now work at Meta proceed to have entry to Twitter mental property or commerce secrets and techniques. Twitter responded to a request for remark with an automatic e-mail of a poop emoji.

Twitter additionally mentioned Meta is “prohibited” from intercepting knowledge from any Twitter service. Proprietor of Twitter, Elon Musk, Twitter has not too long ago taken a lot of steps to ban any makes an attempt to hack knowledge, together with limiting the variety of tweets customers can see in a day. On the time, Musk mentioned it was in response to the corporate utilizing Twitter to coach their AI fashions.

A cursory search of LinkedIn by the Guardian discovered a number of Meta workers employed up to now 12 months who beforehand labored at Twitter. Nonetheless, it’s fairly frequent for tech workers to leap from one firm to a different, particularly if they’ve labored on a social media platform.

The specter of litigation over commerce secret appropriation just isn’t with out precedent or consequence within the tech business. In 2018, for instance, the Google-owned self-driving automobile firm Waymo sued Uber for stealing commerce secrets and techniques, after a prime Waymo government left the company to affix Uber’s efforts to develop its personal self-driving know-how. Google and Uber ultimately settled for $245 million. The worker in query, Anthony Levandowski, was later charged with theft of commerce secrets and techniques and sentenced to 18 months in federal jail, which he didn’t serve as a result of he The pardon was granted by former President Donald Trump.