OAN’s Noah Herring
5:20 PM – Thursday, July 6, 2023
Twitter has threatened to sue Meta over its new Threads app claiming that the platform has violated Twitter’s “intellectual property rights.”
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On Wednesday, a Twitter attorney sent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a cease-and-desist letter that accused the company of stealing trade secrets after hiring ex-Twitter employees.
In that letter, the attorney claimed Musk’s company had “serious concerns” that Meta “has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
“Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal laws as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter,” the letter said.
Meta communication director Andy Stone refuted the claim, saying “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee – that’s just not a thing.”
Elon Musk also commented on his platform’s new legal obstacle and tweeted, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
In the cease-and-desist letter, attorneys representing Elon and his platform asserted that “Meta is expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or follower data… Scraping any Twitter services is expressly prohibited for any reason without Twitter’s prior consent.”
Although the letter does not mention any specific case where Meta engaged in data scraping.
The Threads app has experienced a sizable growth in the first few days of operation. Zuckerberg reported that there have been over 30 million sign ups in the app’s first day, making it the number-one free app on the IOS app store as of Thursday afternoon.
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