Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) lawyers have accused Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) of abusing a deal to use data from the social media platform in the development of apps.
According to a letter from Elon Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro, “Microsoft may have been in violation of multiple provisions of the agreement for an extended period of time”.
Twitter alleged that Microsoft had ignored limits on the use of its free application programming interface (API) to develop products on the Xbox One game console, Bing search engine and Azure cloud platform, among others.
“Twitter enforces rate limits on use of the Twitter API, which the agreement prohibits developers such as Microsoft from exceeding or circumventing,” Spiro explained.
“Despite these limitations, the Microsoft apps accessed Twitter’s APIs over 780 million times and retrieved over 26 billion tweets in 2022 alone.”
Spiro requested Microsoft carry out an audit on the use of Twitter’s API by 7 June, which the latter told the New York Times Microsoft still does not pay for despite discussions of a discounted rate last month.
“For years Microsoft has used Twitter’s standard developer APIs free of charge in order to benefit from Twitter’s data and services […] that generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue,” the lawyer added.
A Microsoft spokesperson responded that the tech giant would “review these [Twitter’s] questions and respond appropriately”, adding, “we look forward to continuing our long-term partnership with the company”.