Elon Musk’s Twitter Threatens to Sue Meta Over Threads, Alleging Meta Hired ‘Dozens’ of Twitter Employees to Launch Copycat App; Meta Disputes Claim

variety.com:

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor The battle between Elon Musk’s Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta over the launch of Instagram’s Twitter rival Threads has taken a legal turn.

On Wednesday, Meta’s Instagram debuted Threads, a text-focused social app designed to piggyback off Instagram’s infrastructure and user base.

The app had more than 30 million sign-ups as of Thursday morning, according to Zuckerberg. In a July 5 cease-and-desist letter addressed to Meta CEO Zuckerberg, a lawyer representing Twitter said that 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.” The letter said 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.” “Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of Twitter employees,” the letter says, alleging that “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.” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone, asked for comment, referred to his post on Threads that said, “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.” The letter from Twitter’s lawyers to Meta was first reported by Semafor.