4 ms·

Ask HN: How is “Bluesky” legally able to replicate the “Twitter” GUI?

• Zetobal 3y ago
  Why though?
• BulgarianIdiot 3y ago
  When you say how they can "legally" replicate it, let's first acknowledge that 99.99% of what we do, our work, is replicating something, reflecting, transforming, combining, sure, but mostly replicating things. You think the similarity is notable, broadly. Fine, but let's break it down in legal sense. What kind of claim can you have here? Clearly, the icons are not copied, they're just similar. The layout is not unique either, millions of sites have one like it. The round blue button and other unnecessary similarities seem to rub it on the nose "hey I'm Twitter" but I don't think it's illegal, unless Twitter has a design patent for their UI. So if it's not copyright and not patent, what would it be? Not trademark, either, as it says "post" not "tweet". Of course we can say "they have retweets" and so on. But those were concepts invented not by Twitter but their users, in the open-source, no-ownership way. Twitter can't claim to say they invented post sharing. They just can't. Their only moat is the network effects of their userbase. I see no technical or design moat. Keep in mind Android copied iOS wholesale. It copied iPhone wholesale. All the things. All of them. Apple tries to sue about some trivial aspect they had a design patent on, and lost. Sometimes you see they copied, and it's blatant, but upon closer look, there's nothing illegal. And maybe it's for the best. Nowadays Android copies iOS, iOS copies Android. You could say it's a beneficial relationship of copying. But if Twitter dies because someone copied it... it means Twitter had nothing more to contribute. Apple has a lot more to contribute, this is why they're doing fine, despite everyone copying them.
  • rsynnott 3y ago
    > Of course we can say "they have retweets" and so on. But those were concepts invented not by Twitter but their users, in the open-source, no-ownership way. Twitter can't claim to say they invented post sharing. They just can't. Even Twitter's users can't, can they? I'm 99% sure that Tumblr had an equivalent function before people started doing it on Twitter, and I'd be surprised if Tumblr invented it, either.
    • BulgarianIdiot 3y ago
      Sure, well users started doing the "RT: ...." thing, which prompted Twitter to add the feature.
      • rsynnott 3y ago
        Yup, but I think even when users started doing that, they were inspired by Tumblr's reblog and similar mechanisms. (Actually, I think Livejournal had this even earlier, though I couldn't swear to it)
        • BulgarianIdiot 3y ago
          Kinda weird that at this level it's still the same old game. One user makes the content (Tumblr), another copies and gets viral (Twitter).
• bloak 3y ago
  Potentially there could be some problem with copyright, patents or trademark law (which are, of course, very different things) in a particular case but people have been cloning software since time immemorial and the world would be a worse place if they were not able to do so.
• HelloNurse 3y ago
  It's perfectly distinguishable, because Twitter uses Twitter trademarks and quasi-trademarks, e.g. the "Search Twitter" box, the "Tweet" button, the little blue bird logo, while Bluesky uses Bluesky ones, e.g. "Welcome to Bluesky". Everything else is so generic that it doesn't represent brand identity. For example, Facebook uses a lot of blue in a similar three columns layout too.
• rsynnott 3y ago
  It's pretty difficult to effectively legally defend a UI, and it's not uncommon for them to be very similar; while there's a bit of variance now, historically all spreadsheet apps looked pretty much the same, say.