So I am not a lawyer, and if you do this stuff you should get a real lawyer (I mean, I have lots of real lawyers! ;P), but I am on the front lines of a lot of these battles (look into who I am if you haven't; hell: I've had Snapchat once try to come after people in my ecosystem, and the only thing their lawyers had as an argument was trademark law... I easily shoved them away), and I am going to claim Twitter would have no legs to stand on. At best--at BEST--they could ban you and all of your company accounts from their service.
Heh. To save some people a click: An important figure in the iOS jailbreaking scene (maker of the foundational tweaking framework and app store).
Thanks for all the good times. Jailbreaking was great for my experimentation urge and taught me a lot about Unix. It also informed some software opinions I still hold today (much more things should work like WinterBoard's layering). A jailbreakable iOS device is a great educational toy for a kid interested in messing with technology (Amazon Kindles are good for this too, by the way).
And thanks for also being involved in legally defending these freedoms. (I've been waiting for a chance to say this without writing a completely unproductive comment)
How would it not be a CFAA violation? E.g. if they included the official client's API key, surely that falls under "(6) knowingly and with intent to defraud traffics (as defined in section 1029) in any password or similar information through which a computer may be accessed without authorization, if—(A) such trafficking affects interstate or foreign commerce".
(I say this not because I think it should be a crime, but because I think the CFAA is a terribly broad law)
So maybe they can't sue the company making a third party app. But take Discord for instance. It's against the Discord terms of service to use a third party client, and there are stories of Discord banning users who do use third-party clients.
Now, Discord doesn't need to sue anyone to stop me from using a third party client—the threat of being banned is enough deterrent to keep me on the official client.
Discord doesn't ban third party clients, only illegal stuff like spamming.
From the people at Discord:
> I run the infrastructure department at Discord which includes our anti-spam engineering team --
Just want to +1 what you're saying and confirm that we are never trying to ban third party clients (that aren't self-bots). Honestly, it would be a waste of our time and basically do nothing good for Discord.
I talked about that in at least half of my original comment. To repeat, Twitterific managed to get to having the kind of marketshare to make that war interesting (in a way Discord clients never have and likely never will: they didn't make the same bargain with third-party app developers that Twitter did, where Twitter left most of the innovation to third-parties).
