This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I love how companies can be like "you can't have those people they belong to me". And that's somehow normal.
That's how corporations view us peasants. As their property that they are entitled too.
But it's not normal. Elon has done a terrible job with Twitter from the beginning, and this is just one more error in judgment. Twitter will lose on this point unless they can prove that these people are using "secret inside info" at Threads. Courts take a dim view of not letting people pursue their livelihood. The fact that these people were fired does not help their case.
In America you can sue anyone for anything. This is probably just something the lawyer's added to their actual lawsuit regarding IP. Threads does look and act kind of like Twitter, but you can't patent a message board.
Secret insider info is that the twitter servers are burning and the remaining employees are probably just fucking around to see how they can get Elon into his demon mode 👿
Workers must choose which eccentric billionaire-run media platform to pledge their loyalty to, then they must never work in their chosen field again.
Feels very American to me.
Man, who could've predicted that this would age very poorly?
Everyone, you say?
That didn't age well
I love how this statement is dripping with condescension for the people who built the service he's currently driving into the ground - all while thinking of himself as some kind of super genius.
Woops!
Yes we fired them! No we didn't pay their severances!
But also.... MINE.
Elon is such a pathetic twat.
He's such a fucking cry baby
Also forced them into arbitration, then refused to arbitrate the dispute.
"How dare they use our abandoned slaves? Slave should stay forever loyal to their master no matter how we mistreat it. They are our property, we have all rights to their use, skills and knowledge."
If this goes anywhere, Confederacy actually won the long game.
It is ridiculous for any company to claim they are entitled to the knowhow of professionals they fired.
Non compete clauses are illegal in California.
It's dumb that they're not illegal everywhere but Twitter and Facebook are both located there.
They're rarely enforceable elsewhere, anyway. They usually depend on intimidating people, since they're not likely to win in court for the vast majority of cases (which is why they should be straight up illegal).
It's fairly ridiculous. So long as they don't take company property with them from the previous employer, there really shouldn't be an issue. Patents should be more than sufficient to protect IP. If you're concerned about someone building on that patent independently, you should probably do what it takes to keep them.
I simultaneously want Threads to fuck off and also decimate Musk's Twitter. But ultimately I want both to fail.
If they could double KO in the process that would be nice
I mean Elon fired so many where did he expect them to go 🥴
Here is an analysis of twitter's legal letter by a litigation lawyer.
tldr: letter is weak
This confirms what everybody has been saying: this letter is just a PR stunt.
Elon Musk's entire existence is a PR stunt. After all, they already fired their marketing department.
Elon views even previous, no longer employed workers as his slaves for life. The truly disturbing thing is he's not the only one with that mindset.
To be honest I kinda want threads to crush Twitter because I despise Musk so much, a lot more than Zuckerberg. Yes, Meta is a horrible company who steals all your data but if I just look at the person behind it I would know who I would kill if I only can choose one. Threads isn't a Lemmy competitor anyway, they work so different. I think Mastodon might get an issue because sites like Mastodon/Threads/Twitter are all about getting famous people on your site and let's be real: Most famous people are not hardcore nerds, some of them might not even heard of Linux. If they can choose between Twitter itself, Twitter by Facebook , or Twitter for nerds (c'mon you know that's true at the moment) I don't know what they will choose but I DO know what they will NOT choose. I hope Twitter fails because it turns into a shit hole and threads fails because it never reaches critical mass.
Zuck and Meta are massive pieces of garbage but seeing Elon get owned where it hurts is hilarious lol
I've heard Zuck called a lot of names. A LOT of them, most of them well deserved and fitting...but I've not heard very many people call him stupid or bad at his job.
Elon on the other hand....
The thing is, Zuck doesn't have a rabid fan base who licks the shit he drops as he walks. Zuck sucks but he keeps to himself and his business most of the time. Elon on the other hand has a huge rabid fanbase who treat him like he's the messiah reincarnate. Which makes it all the more satisfying when Elon loses over Zuck. Seeing Zuck doing something and failing just makes me shrug and say "He deserved it." Elon, on the other hand, I REVEL in seeing his stupidity bite him in the ass again and again.
this is the same guy that says that wfh is unethical. he clearly sees workers as his serfs since he feels entitled to their work even after firing them.
Let me try to see if I get the logic here. So a company fires a lot of people, and then another company hires them.
These workers then are leveraged by the new company to do something similar to what they have been doing in the previous company. This allows the new company to create a competing product that seems to capture part of the previous company's market.
But now the first company wants to sue the second company for... leveraging those recently dismissed workers?
One of those companies seem to be acting in a very strategically sound way, and it's not the one which fired those workers in the first place...
Interesting, isn't it? When you have a problem with Twitter they send you a poop emoji, but when Twitter has a problem they fire off a cease-and-desist within hours. Elon is the perfect capitalist.
The simple fact that they are former employees is meaningless. This is especially true in California (i.e. where Twitter HQ is, and presumably most of these employees) where non-competes are nearly completely unenforceable. Twitter will have to specifically show that it's about their internal trade secrets, and not just the general experience they brought from their time at Twitter.
But right now, it's entirely Twitter doing the talking. We haven't seen yet how Meta will respond. I predict there is a 0% chance that Threads gets shutdown any time soon.
If you read the actual letter, it seems to paint a slightly different picture. They vaguely order Meta to stop using twitters trade secrets (whatever that may be), and serve notice to preserve communications. That's fairly normal. But then they have an entire tangent about scraping Twitter's publicly available data.
Personally I am enjoying watching these 2 idiots go after each other.
Zuckerberg isn’t going after anyone lol. Elon is having a petulant breakdown as per usual
Zuckerberg is going after Elongated Muskrat by creating Threads and taking advantage of Twitters weakness.
Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing capitalists (not to be confused with the capitalism sycophant, self-hating peasants that don't hold significant capital and never will but call themselves capitalists) despise more than actual competition.
The goal of unchecked, unregulated capitalism is to end capitalism, ie competition.
That's why entire industries merge into a single entity to create a monopoly, as the regulators the oligarchs captured decades ago that were supposed to prevent such anticompetitive behaviors sit back passively with their rubber stamps.
People always call this a market failure while willfully ignoring that whenever markets are left unchecked, this is the inevitable outcome.
LOL!! Someone doesn’t like free market capitalism! LOL!!
Wait, so Elon doesn't want the people he fired, but he also doesn't like it when they move to the competition? Is this guy fucking ret*rded or something?
The cream on top of this cherry is that Meta claim that they don’t have any ex-twitter employees.
“Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, told Semafor that Twitter’s accusations are baseless. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” he said.”
It's kind of weird that Musk assumes there's anything special about Twitter that you couldn't build in a few weeks with a competent dev team.
The only value Twitter has/had is its user base. There's no patents or intellectual property that can be sold off if they lose that.
Yes, It is definitely a case of taking US$44 billion and throwing it away. But it is worse than that, because Twitter was a resource for the internet community.
And his attempts to make money after the fact are as pathetic as a World Leader using his position to spruik tins of beans.
It is almost like some sort of performance art.
I never liked that the supposed public square on the internet was in private hands, it should've always been a protocol like Usenet or Mastodon where anyone could spin up a server and participate.
Elon didn’t need any extra help running Twitter into the ground, but it’s already too late to put the genie back in the bottle, Threads is already going to take over, and it’s honestly 1 solid update with added features away from absolutely decimating Twitter.
I would’ve preferred more people migrate to Mastadon, but that’s over, any momentum that may have had will be sucked away by Threads until they screw up, hopefully by then Mastadon will be in a better position to capitalize on user dissent.
Mastadon was never going to be mainstream, really, it required too much activation effort from people who are used to everything being streamlined and now are expected to start over. Threads can immediately port over any Instagram user and everything they already do, there is little to no barrier for entry.
Services from non-tech giants are only going to appeal to people willing to put the effort in to remove themselves from those company's clutches. Which isn't most people.
Musk is being an immature crybaby again, but there's a certain pattern of Facebook/Meta hiring execs who used to work on competing products only to gain an insight perspective on their competitors' plans by milking them for insider information.
They did the same when Google+ launched.
