On the day Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta launched Threads, a text-based companion to Instagram, a Silicon Valley legislation agency representing Elon Musk despatched them a cease-and-desist letter, accusing the app of “systematic, willful and illegal misappropriation” of Twitter’s mental property, commerce secrets and techniques and knowledge.
The letter from Quinn Emanuel lawyer Alex Spiro, dated July 5 and printed on Thursday by the outlet Semafor, is addressed to Zuckerberg and Meta’s chief authorized officer, Jennifer Newstead.
Spiro claims that Meta has employed “dozens of former Twitter staff” over the previous yr, with entry to the corporate’s commerce secrets and techniques “and different extremely confidential data,” which they used to develop Threads as a “copycat” app.
“Twitter intends to strictly implement its mental property rights, and calls for that Meta take fast steps to cease utilizing any Twitter commerce secrets and techniques or different extremely confidential data,” wrote Spiro.
Musk himself commented on information stories concerning the letter by tweeting, “Competitors is ok, dishonest shouldn’t be.”
Meta spokesman Andy Stone dismissed Twitter’s accusations. “Nobody on the Threads engineering staff is a former Twitter worker – that’s simply not a factor,” he instructed Semafor.
Zuckerberg launched the Twitter-lookalike app on Wednesday, providing customers the flexibility to port their whole community from Instagram, one other Meta-owned platform. Greater than 30 million customers have signed up up to now, he stated on Thursday. The app’s rollout within the EU has been delayed attributable to privateness issues.
On the finish of June, Musk imposed limits on how a lot knowledge may be learn on Twitter, saying the non permanent measure was designed to fight “knowledge scraping and system manipulation.” He additionally turned off the flexibility to learn Twitter with out an account.
Federal regulators had beforehand scrutinized Meta for its behavior of shopping for rivals or creating copycat merchandise to run them out of enterprise. The corporate, which started as Fb, purchased Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Since then, it has rolled out Instagram Tales to compete with Snapchat, and Fb Reels as a rival to TikTok.
