Twitter Threatens To Sue Meta Over Threads - Slashdot

Posted by msmash

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  Twitter fired or laid off something like 75-90% of their workforce. I doubt Zuckerface needs to poach anyone.

  Although, it being Zuckerface, he might poach people simply because he doesn't know how to do anything aboveboard.

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  • Consequences?

    ... of MYYYYY actions?

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      I'm rich! My actions should not have consequences I don't like!

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        Of course, with the rich - most of their lives have reinforced that belief in a freedom from consequences...

  • Not poaching, trade secrets

    The summary indicates the complaint is really over intellectual property, including trade secrets. Being fired or laid off does not allow you to divulge such IP.
    
    You are however allowed to take with you the general knowledge and the skills and experience you gained at a previous employer. So the fight will be over whether a former employee is sharing general knowledge or a trade secret.

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      True. I'd be very interested in seeing what "trade secrets" are supposedly being infringed. It doesn't seem like there'd be a lot of secret sauce in how Twitter delivers tweets that couldn't be duplicated by the methods Facebook uses to deliver posts...

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        You cannot infringe trade secrets. You can illegally obtain trade secrets, you are not required to not "infringe" them.

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          Fair enough, but if you're not using them, doesn't it become very hard to prove that you obtained them?

    • The bullshit of this is astounding. As a tech worker in a specialized discipline, you become a liability to hire while the cost of a mass layoff is a massive potential windfall. If Twitter succeeds, then American IT workers will be the biggest losers of all.

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      > Being fired or laid off does not allow you to divulge such IP.

      Fortunately Twitter publishes The Algorithm on github so the rest is general knowledge.

      It's great that Facebook-aligned groups will be leaving Twitter.

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        No twitter has NOT published their algorithm.

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      "Being fired or laid off does not allow you to divulge such IP."

      It's not clear if there is any IP. Trade secrets are not really IP, trade secrets are protected by whatever protections the company creates. When they fire employees, they cannot assume that employee confidentiality continues to apply.

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    I think your first point (layoffs) hits the nail right on the head.

    Since we've all been witness for years to how Twitter was done...and now for months how it was undone...it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to assume that a group of reasonably talented developers could recreate its functionality completely independently. Their task would be made even easier if there was already a stable, global, and free platform for them to deploy it on at scale from day zero, along with a gigaton of high-quality da

• The entire twitterverse packed up and left when Big Mouth Billy Bass took over

  • Love him or hate him, Musks take over of Twitter has done wonders to improve* the site.

    *Improve: verb: driven in to the ground; to make unusable; brought up on certain doom that it will cease to exist.

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      Boss: "I like pancakes! Can you make this company flatter so that it looks like a pancake too?"

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      One day. Far far in the future. Musk will be recognised as the hero he clearly is. There are not many people out there that would (or could) burn $44 Billion to destroy the scourge of twitter.
      Musk is a new kind of hero for the 21st century.:)

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      Musk might have been reading about soil improvement [washington.edu] for the Boring Company. Certainly, his management style is like a giant compactor, and he's definitely soiled Twitter's reputation...

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    Twitter has broken usage records repeatedly *after* Musk bought it.

    It's in much better hands now, and busier than ever.

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      Usage records matter far less than valuation:

      https://www.forbes.com/sites/a... [forbes.com]

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        Based on my experience with Musk's Twitter - those usage records are probably skewed by people hitting "reload" multiple times, hoping the site will finally load correctly!

        Side note - Twitter appears to have quietly fixed a bunch of stuff that's been broken for weeks/months, all stuff that broke at some point after the Musk takeover.

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      This is just goofy kool-aid drinking fanboiism at it's most perplexingly vapid.

• Turnabout is fair play - Meta's response to this letter should just be a poop emoji.

  • They could do that

    The lawsuit will be unimpacted by this. Impacted, poop, get it?

    With that said, Zuckerberg must be interested in paying out large sums of cash. This is not going to go away without a payoff.

    • At this point I think it's safe to say Meta can endure protracted expensive legal costs far better than Twitter.

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        Zuck and Musk is who you should be looking at.

        Also, read the letter carefully. This is going to turn on patents.

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          This is going to turn on patents.

          Oh for sure, but that still means years of extremely expensive litigation, and, because we're talking about two juggernauts, you're looking at even more time and money to get to the finish line. Oracle first sued Google in 2010 and the case (or string of cases related to the initial lawsuit) finally resolved shortly after the Supreme Court ruling in 2021

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              In it's space, at least. Even with its diminished value, it's not like there are many valuable microblogging platforms with worldwide penetration. There were some 500 million tweets per day last year

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        Whaaat? Twitter is *still* worth about half what Elon paid for it.:-)

      • Thank goodness for the Metaverse cash cow

        Yeah, the Metaverse is such a cash cow Facebook can spend money any way it likes. Oh wait...

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          Regardless of that, Meta is currently profitable while Twitter is floating on loads of debt, expensive lending, and a tight VC market. Takes money to pay lawyers

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            Facebook is publicly traded. Twitter is now private. Publicly traded companies have less ability to do whatever the f' a CEO feels like.

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              Sure but they're going to defend themselves in court, particularly if/when Twitter sues them for a specific value. They have a product the developed and want to market. They believe they have the right to do so. Why wouldn't they fight it? Oracle and Google are both public and spent 11 years of litigation (and tens of millions of dollars easily) on the topic API copyrights. Of course it was worth it for Google to defend themselves when Oracle wanted ~$9b in damages, publicly owned or not. I'd say it's

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            Anyone who claims to know about Twitter's financials is talking out of their ass. It's all just speculation at this point.

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      Are you a lawyer?
      I ain't, but can't imagine that offering people who had been sacked by Twitter jobs with the competition can be actionable. Ok, some of them resigned, but that was not with the expectation of being to join the competition half a year (?) later.

      • This also assume that Facebook's general counsel did not approve all of these hires and declined to review their previous employment contracts and NDA's or that Meta started the Threads project without any legal evaluation of their risk in terms of IP.

        Now this may be possible to have happened, Meta's lawyers may be stupid and asleep at the wheel but it seems like a pretty big oversight for their lawyers to have missed "all" of those things at once.

        My bet is that they have their asses covered from both aspects.

        • California law opposes non-compete agreements. As long as you don't bring over and use trade secrets, anyone can hire you. And knowing how to do web programming is not a trade secret.

        • The hires aren't the issue

          The employment contracts or whatever are meaningless at this point. The patented features of Twitter are.

          Apparently, Zuckerberg expects to delay the payout for as long as possible.

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            Its not just patents, undisclosed trade secrets are also quite relevant.

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              Which ones? And how so? Trade secrets are vulnerable to theft, not infringement.

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            That could be the case for sure but this is a threat and until they actually file a suit we don't know what secrets or patents are claimed to be infringed here.

            Again this is a big rollout for Meta, a big move against Twitter. I would hope Meta has some people doing code review and a handle on what would infringe.

            It's not like it's impossible to create a Twitter without infringing on parents, there's a dozen platforms doing the same thing right now (Post, Hive, Gab, Truth etc) and Twitter coul bully them a

        • Isn't it mostly California?

          NDAs are basically unenforceable there. Same with anti-competitive employee contracts. There's a handful of deep south states you can get away with that, but just about any state you can find software engineers has a court system that'll tell Musk to go pound sand.

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          I doubt there's any obvious violations. But situations like this are probably unusual enough that there's grey areas in the case law.

          And even if Twitter doesn't expect to win they just need enough of a case to annoy FB and slow things down.

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        Take a one quarter business law class at your local State U's business school and you will understand. It's all quite clear. How you left the company is irrelevant. Company IP, including undisclosed trade secrets, cannot be shared with a new employer. General knowledge outside of that IP, and general skills acquired, may be used at the new employer.
        
        It's about IP, in particular trade secrets, not about particular people. With respect to not working for the competition, that is often considered unenforceab

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          When you leave a company, that company does not continue to own your knowledge.

          "undisclosed trade secrets"

          Are their disclosed trade secrets?

          How does a company know that another uses its "trade secrets" rather than simply employing people to work on similar things? What kinds of "trade secrets" could a remedial social media site have? Ones that competitors wouldn't develop on their own if it suits them?

          Not at all convinced this a non-zero set, just a load of posturing BS.

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      Ha. I don't see Facebook dropping cash at Twitter's feet and running away without putting up a fight.

      I could imagine Facebook simply buying Twitter, although it might be stopped either by Musk's ego or government anti-trust action.

      • Like SCO?

        They put up a hell of a fight too.

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      LOL that would assume that anything said by Twitter has the slightest merit.

      Protect trade secrets as IP? How did Twitter do any of that? By firing all of its developers and not paying severance packages? Is that how they obtained non-disclosure agreements?

      We can only hope that each does nuclear damage to the other. That would be delightful. It's unlikely Twitter will last long enough to see a lawsuit through.

      • Patents

        "Twitter has a total of 2170 patents globally, out of which 1819 have been granted."

        Good luck with that, Zuck. It'll take forever but there'll be a payout in the future. Hope this was worth it.

        • Re: Patents

          As if facebook does not have patents to push text to a server for others to download a d read?

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            They'd have to demonstrate prior art, and since both were established around the same time...this is going to be fun. Bring popcorn.

            I promise there will be a payout at the end. It's just a matter of delaying the inevitable.

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              You should stop pretending you understand anything about this. You clearly do not.

              Patent litigation takes many years, Twitter likely cannot last that long and Twitter didn't even mention patent infringement. Again, that was only you.

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          Companies generate that many patents a year. I cannot imagine Facebook finding that portfolio intimidating, or even concerning.

          And Twitter didn't even mention patents, that's just you.

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        How an employee left the company is irrelevant. They are still bound not to disclose trade secrets. Trade secrets are legally considered IP just like patents.

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          "How an employee left the company is irrelevant."
          Says you. How an employee leaves a company determines what they are bound by.

          "They are still bound not to disclose trade secrets."
          Only if those "trade secrets" are declared to the employee and they continue to be bound to non-disclosure.

          "Trade secrets are legally considered IP just like patents."
          False. People call "trade secrets" IP, but they are not IP "like patents" at all.

          Patents are publicly disclosed. Trade secrets are not. That's literally the defin

• If you can't innovate... litigate -- that's the American way.

  The lawyers of the USA thank you for your service.

  • If you can't innovate... litigate -- that's the American way.

    The lawyers of the USA thank you for your service.

    This reminds me of another such similar showdown. I'm old enough to remember Steve Jobs raging against Google when he found out about Android:

    "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

    This from the guy who famously said that "Good artists copy. Great artists steal". See also: Xerox Alto and the Mac.

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      Xerox invited Apple in. Xerox also had no plans to use the stuff themselves.

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        Xerox did not give Apple permissions, however, to use it in their product. Patents apply whether you market a product or not. Whether it should, is a philosophical question.

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        Apple may have also given them stock as part of a deal, not sure about that.

• what secrets could they possible need to make an app that allows you to post text?

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    I suspect that there are some nontrivial elements to doing that at significant scale, reasonable latency, adequate reliability, and low cost.
    
    What seems much less likely is that Facebook didn't already have solutions to those problems sorted out for their existing products that could be reasonably quickly shoved into a roughly twitter-shaped frontend; I can't think of anything twitter does that would be more than a UI decision away from what at least one of facebooks' existing things also already does.

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      Reading past tweets of the richest lunatic on earth, it's not very hard to do and former employees were lazy and dumb.

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    The only thing I can think of is Twitter thinks the former employees are taking code or trade secrets that Twitter owns to Meta. If this isn't the case, then Twitter just doesn't have a leg to stand on.

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    Algorithms that show you the posts/threads you are most likely to be interested in, how to monetize them, and how to scale it to a large audience. All of which Meta are better at than Twitter.

  • I'd rather Threads than Twitter

    Twitter has become the proverbial Nazi Bar. The comments section is terrifying. The only folks buying blue checks are hard right extremists and their comments are all #1. I can't see Twitter right now (no account and it's down for ACs again) but I'd seen some crazy **** out there. Like streams of transphobia on random threads, let alone on trans influencer's threads.
    
    I think Musk wants Twitter to take over for Fox News when the Boomers age out and Gen XMZ cord cutters become unreachable. There's a *lot*

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    I'd suggest that there could be trade secrets related to running a platform at-scale (which Meta knows how to do, obviously), but by all accounts Twitter itself doesn't even know how to run a platform at-scale. Sounds like it's held together by duct tape and shoestrings, and that that was true even before Musk took over.

    E.g. Nearly all of the devs had access to prod data, including private DMs. Audit logs were either nonexistent or could be tampered with by devs. Changes deployed directly to prod without te

• by dmay34 ( 6770232 ) on Thursday July 06, 2023 @03:23PM (#63662522)

  They've both been firing people by the 10's of thousands. You can't claim someone was poached if you fired them!

• As far as I'm concerned, the world will be a better place if they both go scorched-earth on the other.

• Twitter should have kept their employees, now that they are not working for twitter they can use their brains to come up with a better Twitter. Everything at Twitter was invented by employees not by management, so the same employees are now inventing at a new company.

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      At the rate Twitter is going, almost any alternative would be.

• Curious because if it is illegal to try and entice expertise in a certain field, then nobody would ever be able to leave their current employer unless they're starting a new career or work in a completely different business segment.

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    It's not so much that poaching is illegal. It's a matter of potentially breaking a non-compete. Non-competes can situationally be enforced. The FTC, however, is proposing a ban on non-competes.

• 'Spiro 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.'

  When you fire an employee, you have no claim to where they can or cannot work. Hiring "dozens of former Twitter employees" is just fine, Twitter has nothing but disrespect for those people.

  And "continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets"? If they do without confidentiality, then they are not protected trade secrets. That's a Tw

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    they can hire all they want, they just can't build a derivative product based on knowledge they gained at twitter. and if used source code then even worse as twitter owns it not meta or the ex-twitter employees.

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      you ABSOLUTELY can build a competitive product based on knowledge gained at twitter. "Derivative product" assumes something unethical.

      "and if used source code then even worse as twitter owns it not meta or the ex-twitter employees"

      We have NO evidence of this. Again, you're assuming Twitter is a victim. They fired their developers; they have no say what those people do now.

• Really wondering what would be trade secrets that former Twitter employees could be using at Threads...

  The article linked to even says "No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee". If it's not engineering related would could it even be?

  And if it is engineering, what would be "trade secret" verses simply knowing how to build out backends to handle a massive scale of users (which you'd expect Meta to have its own ideas on anyway).

• Uh (Score:4, Insightful)

  by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Thursday July 06, 2023 @03:45PM (#63662636)

  Why have a resume if the experience you gained in one job cannot be used in your next job? I'm not talking about, for example, the formula for Coca Cola.. but things like Linux is a better choice than Windows. What exactly is propreitary information? Depending on how schizophrenic your employer is, they might want to claim that revealing anything you learned while employed by them, such as that it's a good idea to use a particular caching algorithm when you have millions of users.. is propreitary. You may say that's known in the industry but a good lawyer could easily frame the argument such that it was novel and propreitary to use caching in the context of retrieving social media profiles from a database when you needed to support millions of users. Also, when we are talking attorneys unless you're 8 digit wealthy you've already lost.

• See here: https://i.redd.it/rwuw09r6sn6a... [i.redd.it]
  Dude fancies himself a genius that invented everything though.

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    All his companies are basically poached employees from other companies that were working on stuff. For example, Blue Origin and maybe others would be further ahead if SpaceX if he hadn't hired their engineers and stunted those companies from growing.

• What are they actually saying? That you cannot make a forum that's text based? If that's the case, all they need to do is say "we're imitating public email lists" or "copying slashdot" or whatever they like.

  Twitter didn't innovate anything at all, all that they did was get some hype over a stupidly short message limit. That's all. It was the reverse of what makes sense. Everyone hated SMS message limits and Twitter somehow turned that into some sort of attraction - quite how I can't see other than a userbase of snarky people.

• Technology is becoming a tongue-twister...
• Twitter had trade secrets?

• More like 2 spoiled brats bickering over who gets to play with which toy.

  Just spank them good and hard for a while and be done with it.

• You didn't think it was going to be a literal cage match between Musk and Zuckerberg, did you? This story tells me that Musk knew what was happening long before the public did. It's a legal cage match. Regardless, IMHO, Threads is a poor business decision. It has to make money for Meta shareholders. Twitter doesn't have that mill stone hanging around its neck. One should never try to chase the competition. I'd give the first round to Musk.

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    Musk must've went with Trump's Roy Cohn school of MMA training.

• The last time someone tried to compete with facebook or twitter the media instantly declared they were nazis, amazon refused them hosting, google delisted them from search, banks closed their accounts, and payment processors refused to allow them to send or receive money.

  Now that an outside owns twitter Facebook was permitted to spin up a "competitor" and it's being artificially propped up in every way possible.

• Are they also going to sue Trump's Truth Social? This is literally a copy of Twitter.

• • Re: I picked the wrong career

    The real news here is that thereâ(TM)s apparently still a lawyer working at Twitter! Or did they just post the job on upwork?

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    I am not so sure on that. I mean, Twitter is not that much different than old Facebook or Instagram. Creating a competing service that doesn't use the same methods to produce a similar product is fair game.

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      there's no complaint yet, but if it's a derivative work then it's a violation

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        "DERIVATIVE WORK" MEANS WHAT? That you suspect Facebook is doing something wrong? Twitter is a derivative work.

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    and poaching isn't even occurring. Poaching is hiring a competitor's employees, not hiring fired employees.

    "Even if they didn't use IP directly, if they built a derivative product with ex-employees they are guilty..."

    "Derivative product" is legally defined now, even in the absence of IP?

    "so hence the poaching claim to establish knowledge."

    Stop talking.

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    He knows if it was up to user choice they'd choose the clearly better product: Threads.

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    Those who can, do.
    Those who can't, sue.

• • Re:

    Wait, you were supposed to suffer, me being an insufferable entitled little shit wasn't supposed to backfire on me!

    -- any Karen ever