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Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

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Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#181

Post by heartbreak »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #30
denotational wrote: post #13

> Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter; that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets [...] This sentence is clearly trying to establish liability by accusing Meta of wilful infringement of Twitter’s rights (i.e. it acted in full knowledge of these fact, even though they may lead to violation of the employees’ restrictive covenants, etc.), as evidenced by t…

This is the same general culture of conspicuously boasted competence that brought us Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Alex Spiro in particular acts like a clown. The firm itself is fine. I know some very smart attorneys who work there, same as any biglaw firm.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#182

Post by LocalH »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #170
mandeepj wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not all that surprising though, Meta could obviously build such a product from their own learnings and IP. Twitter is a public app. How hard it’s to keep the app open on one monitor and write a spec doc on another?

Depends on what constitutes IP. Is an artist with references open in another pane breaking copyright? If we stoop to the rounded-corners Apple level then there's not really much point anyone making anything new anymore.

I mean, isn't the post you replied to essentially the clean room approach? One person/group does the actual reverse engineering and writes up the spec doc, and then a totally separate person/group takes that spec doc and produces code to implement it.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#183

Post by TheCoelacanth »

adam_arthur wrote: post #124
whateverman23 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it as four categories, from least employees to most: 1. Desperately trying to make short term cash, and are trying to do their best with fewer employees than needed to maintain the current product. (Twitter is here). 2. Enough staff to maintain the current product, but not significantly innovate. 3. Significantly more than needed to maintain the current product, leaving room for people to work on non-core produ…

Do you agree or disagree that techproducts today are easier to build than 15 years ago? Everything else is irrelevant. Technology drives abstractions which drive deflation by allowing fewer people to produce more goods. This has been proven and observed for thousands of years Companies can thrive while overemploying people, but eventually they get undercut by one that doesn't

An equally complex product is drastically easier to build now than it was 15 years ago, but expectations since then have risen even more drastically. A product that is competitive in the market is generally harder to build now.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#184

Post by fsociety »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #131

This is not a move that a company makes from a position of strength. I like Musk and frequently defend his decisions, and there's no love lost between me and Meta. But Musks's trigger happy litigiousness is pathetic. His obsession with scrapers scraping public content is extremely cringe and betrays his fundamental misalignment with the open web. The fact that Zuck is planning to make Threads compatible with Activity…

There was a time when Facebook almost became decentralized, long long ago. It is promising to see this line of thought repeat with Threads. My only hesitancy is how the product will evolve, but the saying always goes “you don’t mess with the Zuck”.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#185

Post by inerte »

molave wrote: post #118
ncallaway wrote: post #8

Maybe the facts will bear out that there’s a case here, but my default position is one of skepticism. I guess one takeaway for me is if you don’t want your competitor to hire a bunch of your former employees, don’t make a bunch of your employees former employees.

Makes sense. However, I hope no one takes this the wrong way and hire too many people to starve competitors of talent.

In fact the opposite has happened, and major Silicon Valley companies have agreed not to hire from each other, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#186

Post by raydev »

nicolashahn wrote: post #104
dingosity wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My completely uninformed opinion is Zuck looks kinda ripped. Even though Musk is heavier and taller, I think Zuck could take him. But Newsweek, that bastion of factual reporting on objective reality, says London bookies are giving Musk better odds: https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-cage-figh...

Musk has like 6 inches and 60lbs on Zuck

Zuckerberg has years of training, youth, and general fitness level on Musk.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#187

Post by fennecfoxy »

LocalH wrote: post #182
fennecfoxy wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what constitutes IP. Is an artist with references open in another pane breaking copyright? If we stoop to the rounded-corners Apple level then there's not really much point anyone making anything new anymore.

I mean, isn't the post you replied to essentially the clean room approach? One person/group does the actual reverse engineering and writes up the spec doc, and then a totally separate person/group takes that spec doc and produces code to implement it.

I think that was maybe applicable back in the Gates & Wozniak days but not so sure that approach would be considered "clean" now.

It seems kind of ludicrous that one company can't look at another's product and create the same type of thing, just improved. That's how innovation works.

It's just that in this case, apart from a handful of differences, the core innovation of threads seems to be that Twitter has been taken over by an egotistical maniac and while Zuck is still a billionaire he seems wholly less concerned with tooting his own horn in public as Elon is.

I don't think Elon/Twitter has a leg to stand on, they don't own the concept of a public forum/social media platform, I'm sure that even the shortform that Twitter has enforced since its inception had been done long before.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#188

Post by simmschi »

adam_arthur wrote: post #105
whateverman23 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really possible to say how many people are "working on" Threads, I bet. Threads is using Meta infrastructure. Should all those employees count towards Threads employees? How about HR? Legal? Internal tools? Building staff? Security? etc etc.

I'm not particularly interested in Twitter itself, I just disagree that many of the products we use today require a large number of developers. Its easy to find many examples of apps that were challenging to build even just 10 years ago, that are somewhat trivial now. That trend will only continue. OpenAI only had ~100 employees at one point. You don't need 100s of operations people if you move from on-prem to server…

At a certain scale you start to break many things that you're used to abstract away into a neat little box. This can be anything, from kernel, libraries, network stacks to anything running in the cloud.

"Serverless" is not really an option at a certain scale. It's likely too expensive, but especially a giant risk if you abstract away something that can fail in an interesting way.

I remember we once managed to break the AWS ELB in one AZ and had a nice little call with a dev from Seattle. Another time we managed to saturate EC2 in a zone at a certain time.

You will need people who can dig into this. If you're at Twitter scale you'll probably want whole teams digging into aspects that you take for granted.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#189

Post by nicolashahn »

raydev wrote: post #186
nicolashahn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk has like 6 inches and 60lbs on Zuck

Zuckerberg has years of training, youth, and general fitness level on Musk.

True, I think if they fought today Zuck would win. However, given enough training, Musk can close the gap. If he trained hard and they fought a year from now I'd put money on Musk, hands down.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#190

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

blitzar wrote: post #51
denotational wrote: post #13

> Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter; that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets [...] This sentence is clearly trying to establish liability by accusing Meta of wilful infringement of Twitter’s rights (i.e. it acted in full knowledge of these fact, even though they may lead to violation of the employees’ restrictive covenants, etc.), as evidenced by t…

> As this is supposedly from such a large law firm Is it the same law firm that went with the 'offering to buy twitter and signing a purchase agreement was just a prank bro ' defence? If you find yourself standing up in court making the prank bro argument, then I hope the amount of money you got was a fair price for your dignity.

> a fair price for your dignity

IANAL but my dignity's for sale at pretty low prices. Hell, get a few tequila shots in me and you can have it for free.

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