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Twitter sends legal letter to Meta over Threads, apparently intellectual property rights do matter!
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 7 July 2023
A lawyer representing Twitter owner X Corp has written to your old mate Mark Zuckerberg to express concern that Meta, in developing its new social media app Threads, might have “engaged in systematic, wilful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”.
Which – from a music industry perspective – is kind of interesting. Turns out Twitter does know about the existence of intellectual property laws. Who knew?
Very much connected to Meta’s Instagram platform, Twitter-esque Threads went live earlier this week and is already boasting tens of millions of users.
X Corp alleges that Meta was able to make its new app extra Twitter-esque by employing lots of ex-Twitter employees to help develop it. And, of course, ever since job cuts king Elon Musk took over at Twitter last year, there have been lots of ex-Twitter employees for Meta to headhunt.
“Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees”, says the legal letter to Meta boss Zuckerberg, which was first published by Semafor.
And, it goes on, those former employees “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information”, while some “have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices”.
“With that knowledge”, the letter alleges, “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 law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter”.
The legal letter then confirms that “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. Twitter 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 retention, disclosure or use of its intellectual property by Meta”.
Of course, while Twitter is very keen indeed to enforce its own intellectual property rights, it has generally been somewhat less keen to help other intellectual property owners stop the infringement of their rights on the Twitter platform. Or at least, that’s what the music industry would argue, given that Twitter is the one big social media firm yet to secure any licences for the music that is used in videos posted by its users.
In their recent lawsuit against Twitter, a group of music publishers stated: “While numerous Twitter competitors recognise the need for proper licences and agreements for the use of musical compositions on their platforms, Twitter does not, and instead breeds massive copyright infringement that harms music creators”.
Not only that, the publishers “have spent significant time and resources to identify specific infringers and specific infringements, and to notify Twitter of them. Those specific infringers and specific infringements already number in the hundreds of thousands. Twitter has repeatedly failed to take the most basic step of expeditiously removing, or disabling access to, the infringing material identified by the infringement notices”.
But, if Zuckerberg has allowed or facilitated the infringement of Twitter’s IP rights by his Meta people, well, that’s clearly not on. Insists Twitter.
Though, needless to say, Meta denies any wrongdoing. And it has done so via, well, a post on Threads. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee – that’s just not a thing”, wrote Meta Communications Director Andy Stone yesterday.
Musk, meanwhile, used Twitter to respond to reporting on the legal letter that his lawyers have sent to the Meta chief, noting simply: “Competition is fine, cheating is not”. Fun times.
