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.
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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.
I don’t think Red Cross is going off trademark law; using the Red Cross for anything but the Red Cross (same for the Red Crescent and Red Crystal) is a violation of international law (i.e. the Geneva Convention)
Isn’t that a common symbol for all medical related things?
You would think that, but no. It’s specifically the Red Cross organization. Which is an international organization.
It can also be used by militaries and such for Geneva Convention complaint medical use, such as search and rescue operations or medical centers and such.
That’s it. Those are the only legally allowed uses. And even Geneva Convention complaint medical use is often run by the international organization.
Nope. There’s a reason they go after video games that use the red cross symbol for health packs, that dilutes the meaning of what the red cross stands for.
That’s what we had thought too. Also the fact that it was a really generic looking red plus sign. How can someone trademark a symbol used by everyone? I guess if it wasn’t red, it would have been fine. There was a lot of scoffing going on in clinic.
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 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.