I’m not so sure; given the masterminds involved I think there’s still a decent chance both will find a way to lose.
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When we say “the emperor has no clothes” concerning Twitter, most people refer to Elon. I think that’s not the case, though - the metaphor better refers to the network, and the combined force of 1) Instagram’s userbase and 2) activitypub integration will quickly show Twitter how little their network really mattered in the first place. I feel many Twitter users were there mainly because nowhere else had reached critical mass to the point they could go elsewhere.
Overnight (Literally), that changed.
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Not a lawyer but this is basically correct, although I don’t think “coercion” is required. If meta took advantage of material they knew was revealed by a former employee inappropriately I think they could still be in trouble.
But also, basic engineering knowledge and skills acquired as part of working on a job are not trade secrets. A SWE who has works on twitters infrastructure and implements something broadly similar for a competitor is almost certainly not divulging a trade secret and that happens all the time. Trade secrets come up more with future product plans, financial information, and that sort of thing. Or if someone took actual source code or design documents. But if Twitter had evidence of any of that sort of thing they would be acting on it, not sending vaguely threatening messages with no actual content.
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They can both lose if they make it a protracted battle that lasts for years and the lawyers end up with all the money.
I certainly wouldn’t be sad to see that happen 
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With subclauses of “If there’s a chance you could be dickish, don’t be performatively dickish.”
And:
“If you may be performatively dickish, don’t spend 44 billion to buy the planet’s most visible media company and then run it in a way that intrusively reveals your dickishness on an hourly basis”.
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… on the other hand, you know who should be suing the shit out of Meta this month?
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If true that seems kind of nuts. Why would they not hire any of the thousands of newly available tech workers who had years of experience building the exact kind of online platform Meta was trying to create?
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If it’s true, I’d imagine that it’s specifically to avoid legal issues.
From a technical perspective, it’s the wrong call. But I could see it being a good call from a business / legal perspective.
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It’s not clear why they would need to, and threads has been in development for a while, possibly predating wide availability of ex-Twitter employees. It isn’t like threads does anything fundamental that Meta hasn’t been doing at > 10z twitters scale for years.
Also notice they also said “engineering team.” That doesn’t mean nobody from Twitter was involved.
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Add me to the “why did it have to be Zuc who came up with the go-to Twitter replacement” contingent.
And Threads to me will always be a really grim post-nuke movie from the UK.
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Additional info, links… and much better headline:
From cage fight to page fight: Twitter threatens to sue Meta after Threads app launch
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Anyone here remember SCO Unix suing Linux vendors for IP infringement?
SCO was a Unix vendor for PC hardware, before Linux. Once Linux matured, SCO lost its business model. So they sued Linux vendors, claiming they had all sorts of proof. At the time, I was one of the people who believed (without proof) that the lawsuit was a way to keep share price afloat while the owners looked for an off-ramp.
If you’ve never heard of SCO, you can imagine how the case went.
The Twitter legal threats news is sounding like the “farce” stage of history repeating itself, to my ears.
ETA: here it is.
Beginning in 2003, The SCO Group was involved in a dispute with various Linux vendors and users. SCO initiated a series of lawsuits …
By 2011, the lawsuits fully related to Linux had been lost by SCO or rendered moot and SCO had gone into bankruptcy.
I don’t think the Twitter suits, if they happen, will take this long.
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Threads is not a killer app, there’s no anon its linked to your insta for ever, there is also no porn, the driver of all tech, if there is no porn there is no reason to be there.
The creatives are going to stay away, as there is no room to be creative or gay on a place where you have to be the real you, Facebook / instas instance on one identity means that yeas a lot will try threads, every god dam BBC show i saw the other day was announcing they where on it, but the people who make the interesting stuff wont be.
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SCO (or The Santa Cruz Operation) used to be a PC Unix manufacturer in the 1980s/90s, part of which got sold to a Linux outfit called Caldera, which eventually renamed itself “The SCO Group”. The entity which sued IBM (among others) over Linux IP was “The SCO Group”, not the “Santa Cruz Operation” (which, on the whole, used to be counted among the good guys, way back when).
The main claim in the IBM lawsuit was that The SCO Group was entitled to royalties on Linux because extensive swathes of code from the original AT&T Unix – which The SCO Group said they owned – had ended up in Linux by way of IBM’s AIX operating system and a 1990s cooperation between IBM and the Santa Cruz Operation that ended up never going anywhere. According to the SCO Group, this obviously had to be the case because on their own, a bunch of amateur student/hobbyist developers would never have been able to come up with something like Linux, and it needed a massive infusion of pro-level material from the wizards at AT&T (courtesy of IBM) to get it off the ground.
The SCO Group’s problem, though, was that it turned out to be surprisingly difficult to demonstrate in court exactly which extensive swathes of the original AT&T Unix actually ended up in Linux. (There was code from IBM in Linux but that code came from OS/2, not AIX.) It also turned out that The SCO Group didn’t in fact have standing to sue in the first place as the copyrights for the original AT&T Unix actually belonged to Novell, and what The SCO Group thought they owned were really some rights to exploit the AT&T code commercially.
The general thinking at the time was that The SCO Group was setting itself up to be bought by IBM just to make the lawsuit go away. This was a fatal misconception on The SCO Group’s part because IBM instead preferred to counter-sue The SCO Group into a burnt-out hole in the ground.
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I hope Meta’s legal team auto-respondedto Twitter with a poop emoji.
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Perhaps Meta have already paid them off. Even if the rights search missed it, Meta would have found out when they saw that threads[dot]com was already taken.
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Ah, kids these days.
At the time I was an avid reader of Groklaw.
Though the updates stopped almost exactly 10 years ago, the blog has been preserved and it’s still a compelling read if one is interested in that story.
It was probably the first time Linux legal viability was tested in court.
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The problem with Patents, as you say is that once filed they are not secret
My first project as a Postdoc was sponsored by a chemical company and they asked me to look into a patent from a competitor. The whole thing was obfuscated and there where some false leads and a few things that didn’t make much sense. It took me about a month and a few quick experiments to separate the wheat from the chaff and write a report with recommendations
In fact the company that paid me never bothered with patents because they knew they are almost impossible to enforce, and in certain countries like china is not even worth getting upset about it
If a company wants to protect their IPs there are other ways, but usually starts with treating your employees right and making sure there is always something better in the pipeline
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(link source if you’re curious to see Elon’s asslickers have a meltdown about this tweet)
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Because the value of Twitter was never in the software, it was the network effect. Trying it to Instagram was how they got 30m users on day one.
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