New Delhi:
Threads, an app launched by Meta to take on struggling Twitter, has run into legal trouble just hours after its launch. While the app has already garnered more than 30 million users since its launch on Thursday, its rival has threatened a lawsuit, claiming that Threads infringes on Twitter’s “intellectual property rights.”
Elon Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro writes to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, accusing them of “unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”. This letter was first published by news outlet Semaphore.
The letter accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
“Twitter intends to vigorously enforce its intellectual property rights and demands that Meta take immediate steps to cease using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Alex Spiro wrote in the letter.
Elon Musk, citing the news, said in response to a tweet, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
Meta claimed to have no one on the engineering team threads is a former Twitter employee.
“There aren’t any former Twitter employees on the Threads engineering team — it doesn’t matter,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a Threads post.
Threads is by far the biggest challenger to Musk-owned Twitter, which has seen several potential competitors emerge but, despite its struggles, has yet to replace one of the world’s biggest social media platforms .
on threads, People can post text and links and reply to or repost others’ messages – an offering similar to Twitter.
Instagram and Facebook, both owned by Meta, have a long and successful history of copying the products of upstart Internet competitors. The company’s Reels feature was a parody of TikTok’s viral video app, and its Stories were disappearing posts following the rise of Snapchat.