The Lawyer moshpit will begin. Money is likely to be made, but fuck me these legal cases seem tiring to even be near.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Sorry Elon, but...
I'm fairly sure you don't get to axe most of your staff, refuse (illegally) to pay their severance packages and then sue another company because they hired your now, ex-employees, on the grounds that it's stealing from your company...
Twitter is apparently also struggling to pay for all the individual arbitration claims they forced their ex-employees to engage in rather than a class action, yet now they want to take on a lawsuit against Facebook? Do they honestly think they can come out ahead here?
I hope he does go through with the lawsuit, it would be hilarious. I'm hoping for a ship of theseus argument.
I'm hoping for a mask-off "I paid them once so I own them forever" argument.
Remember: Musk has a bottomless money pit.
I hope to see it run out during my lifetime.
Good, let the lawyers feast on their corpses.
This seems like a pretty heavy lift for Twitter and while I hardly support Meta, if Twitter somehow manages to win sole ownership of the concept of microblogs it would be bad for everyone.
So long, Mastodon. (On the plus side, so long Frank Speech, Truth Social, Gab, etc. etc. etc.)
Yeah, my first reaction to this story was, why didn't they sue any of the other Twitter clones before this?
Because it's a big waste of time and won't get anywhere. The fact that mastodon has been a thing since 2018 (or earlier) unopposed means that they will have a really hard time proving that they ever had any trade ownership over the concept of microblogging.
Given how fast this thing was put together, it's very likely Meta actually DID use stuff from Twitter that was patented. Mastodon less likely, because it was built completely separate over a few years
Writing a Twitter clone isn’t exactly hard, especially for a company that practically invented social media and already runs Instagram and Facebook.
Because Elon wasn’t worried about those.
I think it's also pretty likely Meta is using actual code from Twitter, though. It's not an upstanding company and it put Threads together as fast as possible.
Mastodon was put together over several years using open-source software and keeping open-source, so it probably genuinely doesn't infringe on those patents.
You seem to be equating source code use with patent infringement. They're not really related.
I highly doubt that a company with the monetary force behind it that Meta has needs to steal code from Twitter. Besides, it's made evident more every day that Twitter is the code equivalent of spaghetti and duct tape after Musk had his way with it.
And what makes X upstanding in comparison to Meta? I mean I'm honestly not arguing in favor of Meta and Threads as much as I'm trying to paint the picture that this is Elon "I'll sign an agreement buying Twitter for $44 Billion and attempt to fight my way out of it before the ink dries" Musk that is on the other side of this.
Oh Elon's a piece of shit. It's just I am confident that in investigating either of them they are going to find any manner of bad behavior, but that if an open-source alternative had even a whiff of plagiarism it'd have been hit with takedown notices long ago.
Plagiarism is not patent infringement. You're probably thinking of copyright.
Why would they need to use code from Twitter or even want to? They have hundreds or thousands of engineers to write their own, don’t necessarily use the same languages or tooling, and already have had IG, which works on the exact same model as Twitter, for a decade.
Anyone else thinks it's funny that journalist always have to explain/describe what Meta is? Be it the parent company of Facebook, Whatsapp or Instagram.
I don't think anyone but Google itself takes the name "Alphabet" seriously, either.
Alphabet owns Google, Google isn't alphabet per se.
Google is Alphabet. It was created by restructuring its companies under one umbrella company.
So what you're saying is that Alphabet became the parent company, and owns its subsidiary Google, and that Google isn't Alphabet itself per se.
Thanks for the insight.
I can't believe that "240 character social media post" is somehow a trade secret. What are they expecting to tell the judge and not be laughed out of court?
It might be possible to patent it. Look at Wizards of the Coast and all their crazy card game patents. But the only reason they were able to do that is because their patents are incredibly detailed and specific. So they could change it to 256 characters or something and be fine.
IIRC Threads is 500 characters, not 240, so that wouldn't be a something they could sue over.
However, Twitter has over 2000 patents filed, over 1400 of which are registered in the United States. They deal with malicious advertisement detection & remediation, malware, automatic management of data processing, mobile app management, interactive advertising, and electric publishing to name a few.
I can see where Musk may have found similarities between the software somewhere in the mess of their patents.
But just how would they know the internals of Threads? According to Meta, even Twitter's claim that Threads devs include ex-Twitter employees is wrong.
To me it sounds like Twitter's legal action is just an obstruction tactic.
Your Honor, they copied my most salient lines of code.
Oof, imagine Twitter lawyers bringing in screen shots of their most salient code and SCOTUS TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY. Meta argues it's silly and yet those judges establish that screenshots are the way to discuss software IP.