After a few hours of apparent calm and “noisy” silence of Elon Musk, who did not tweet anything for a whole day, which is very rare, especially since he acquired Twitter, the clash with Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s company that yesterday morning launched in the US and UK its new app for sharing via text, has officially begun. Threads, a “sort of Instagram in which images are replaced by words”
Like any self-respecting “battle”, the first notice sent to Meta by Alex Spiro, Musk’s personal lawyer as well as a partner of the Quinn Emanuel law firm, is a sort of “reprimand”, in fact a “threat of legal action” in all respects, in which accusations of a certain thickness are made, namely “poaching” of former employees and illegal appropriation of trade secrets and intellectual property.
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using Twitter’s trade secrets or other highly confidential information.”
According to lawyer Spiro, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees in the last year, something also “quite obvious” after the huge staff cuts made by Musk in recent months.
These developers, the indictment continues, would be in possession of confidential information and, in violation of state and federal laws, as well as non-compete agreements (obligations) towards their former employer, would have been “deliberately assigned” by Meta to work on Threads
“with the specific intent of using Twitter trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app.”
According to Spiro, Meta also performed “data scraping” with information extracted from Twitter in order to develop and improve its application. Precisely this “technique” of data extraction would have been the basis of Musk’s decision to limit the display of tweets to users on his platform.
In response to these allegations, via a post on Threads, Meta’s director of communications, Andy Stone, claimed that no one on the engineering team responsible for Threads’ development is a former Twitter employee.
Even Elon Musk, after a “long” silence, returned to tweet:
“Competition is good, cheating is not”
A few words, therefore, that give a clear idea of the path that will be taken. Obviously, as you can imagine, we are only at the beginning of a long legal battle similar to many that we have already seen in recent years. Twitter, as imaginable, reserves all rights, including, “but not limited to”,
“the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further storage, disclosure or use of its intellectual property by Meta”
