Twitter is threatening to sue Threads merely 24 hours after it’s release. Meta, the Parent company of newly developed app ‘Threads’ has been accused of "systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and intellectual property." These accusations were made in a letter addressed directly to Mark Zuckerberg by Twitter's lawyer Alex Spiro.
Spiro's Letter as reported by Semafor and other Reuters has accused Zuckerberg of stealing trade secrets and confidential information by hiring ex-Twitter employees and getting them to build the Threads app, in violation of Twitter’s Intellectual Property Rights. Letter goes on to say that Twitter will be taking every step necessary to protect its intellectual property rights.
On the other hand, Twitter’s CEO, Elon Musk has taken the issue to streets, so to speak,by trash talking Mark Zuckerberg om Twitter saying,
“I spent $44 billion for this app and now Lizard boy just decided to hit copy and paste.
It’s personal now. See you in the cage, Zuck.”
Elon made these statements referring to the supposedly upcoming cage match between the two Billionaires
To increase the comedic value of the dispute, there is a verified Twitter account of Mark Zuckerberg which has posted Tweets about it being so easy to make Threads using Ctrl+C+V.
If this turns in to a court battle, there will be action on both fronts for these two tech giants. On a serious note, outcome of this not so little feud could have major consequences for both companies. This also has the potential to become one of the biggest Intellectual property disputes in the recent past.
As for Threads within a day of its launch it has acquired more than 30 million users, mainly due to the easy transferability of the Instagram account into a Threads account. Thread which is primarily a text based platform is relatively similar to Twitter.
Meta has not yet released an official response to the allegations. It remains to be seen how the company will address the accusations and what steps, if any, will be taken to mitigate the situation.