Aha. This may be why Threads is based on ActivityPub - a way to prevent accusations of it being a Twitter clone. It's just an innocent member of the Fediverse. ;)
Yep. Being a part of the fediverse gives Meta a defensible argument that (1) they are not stealing Twitter's intellectual property as Mastodon already exists and (2) they are not monopolizing the Twitter-like social media environment as any of their users could move to Mastodon if they wanted to.
The second point may actually be very true. This way they are a smaller target for anti-trust investigations in case Twitter is completely obsoleted by Threads.
@OldFartPhil Anyway... maybe with "intellectual property" they mean another thing? I mean... if Meta is a Twitter clone, Twitter was a identi.ca clone too.
In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg published by Semafor, a lawyer for Twitter said the company “has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (Meta) has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”.
Makes you wonder what, if any tech they could have appropriated.
I know nothing about law, but if Twitter took Facebook to court, wouldn't they have to reveal the trade secrets they allege were stolen, no longer making them secret? Or is revealing then in court perceived as an open secret?
Courts can have closed source code audited. It’s literally done in a locked room on a device that doesn’t have the ability to export, and people that enter the room are monitored.
Jeez every day Musk does something else to help prove what a giant baby he is. Maybe if you didn’t run Twitter into the ground this wouldn’t be happening??
Twitter claims in the cease-and-desist that Meta has poached dozens of former employees in the past year, some of whom “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information” and “many” of whom have “improperly” kept Twitter documents or electronic devices.
“With that knowledge, 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 letter reads.