Twitter’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, has threatened to sue Meta Platforms (META.O) over its new Threads platform in a letter to Facebook parent company CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Meta, which started Threads on Wednesday and has more than 30 million sign-ups, hopes to compete with Elon Musk’s Twitter by using Instagram’s billions of users.
Sad Day For Elon Musk As 22 Million Join Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads In 24 Hours
Spiro accused Meta of recruiting former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” according to news website Semafor.
“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 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.
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.
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.
Source HarareLive
