Meta, Microsoft, hundreds more own trademarks to new Twitter name
Meta, Microsoft, hundreds more own trademarks to new Twitter name
Billionaire Elon Musk's decision to rebrand Twitter as X could be complicated legally: companies including Meta and Microsoft already have intellectual property rights to the same letter.
important for anybody following this topic to also know that "hundreds of trademarks" can sometimes just mean that there's a few trademarks in each class. Trademarks in the US are divided into classes, so that two companies that do different things can still be named the same or similar.
The article still has a point, in that similar software companies like Meta and Microsoft have trademarks for "X," but if your PVC pipe company is called X, you might not have a good case against Twitter because who is getting confused between PVC pipes and social media?
"Your honor, let the record state that there is a common saying to the effect that "the internet is a series of tubes". Now, PVC pipes are also a variety of tube. Therefore..."
The Olympics did send a cease and desist to Olympic Provisions (a salami maker in Portland, Oregon). So they had to change their name to Olympia Provisions. Perhaps the Olympics felt threatened since people often confuse ‘finocchiona salami’ with ‘finishing a giant slalom’.
Yeah I should have also mentioned that that doesn't prevent companies from trying that kind of bullshit.
Which is somewhat BS, since we have a perfectly good Olympic Peninsula here in Washington State that it was certainly named after.
My vet clinic I work at was contacted by Red Cross some years ago damanding that we change our logo becuase it had a red plus sign in it. It was the most ridiculous thing. How did they even find out about us? we are no big time clinic, only people in our city are going to know who we are. We had that logo for a long, long time. It was just bizarre.
Doesn't necessarily mean the Olympics were in their right.
More likely that the salami maker wanted to avoid / could not afford a legal battle.
Apple tries to trademark their apple logo, not the bitten one a full apple in my country....
Apple stopped giving their new products the"i" prefix because they weren't able to trademark it because "you can't trademark a letter."
I doubt that they'll allow Elon Musk to trademark the letter "x"
You can’t trademark a letter and you can’t copyright a font - I believe the courts have ruled so due to first amendment concerns.
I think you can, however, trademark a logo that consists of a letter. I’m thinking specifically of the McDonald’s M logo. I might be wrong, but I have seen Coming to America multiple times.
The problem here will be that Elon's new X logo is really just an existing Unicode character: 𝕏. It's appeared in maths papers for decades. This isn't like the golden arches - there's nothing novel there to trademark.
Those are all the credentials we need Doctor 👍
That might be copyright though? The McD M.
So is it okay for me to call my mastodon server twitter now?
A shitshow of epic proportions.
oh, look, musk made yet another stupid, impulsive decision that could have disastrous, short- and long-term consequences for
twitterer... "x"Pretty sure Sesame Street's use of the letter X pre-dates Musk's claim to it as well.