The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name. So the trademark should hold for as long as a reasonable person can be confused by the new Twitter regardless of people's dislike towards Elon.
I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.
as it turns out short form stream of conscious rambling was sometimes funny sometimes interesting even sometimes pivotal as a communications tool in countries experiencing civil unrest / injustice. but in its current stage and the state of all social media at this point one wonders why anyone pretends twitter is what it was a decade ago. it just isn't, it could also disappear tomorrow and things probably might even get a little better for the world given how much of a vehicle it is to amplify division.
i remember like i dunno 5-6 years ago when the people in my life started to wean themselves off twitter and i smoked a lot of cope to justify why i was still on it. can't even remember when i stopped using it but again... nothing of value was lost. feels like a fever dream i always thought i had to be tuned the hell in theres just no way that's good for anyone's brain.
instagram/facebook over my 20s left some real mental scars though im still trying to sort what the f those apps did to me and to culture at large. i quit instagram like 3 years ago, the classic millenial exploration of pruning your life of shite things to lower the anxiety. the scars i am still stuck with, and mind you i literally don't have these apps anymore:
- i still feel this soft pressure that anything i do doesn't matter unless there is a witness (a post, a story, etc). that is insane. it's been three years and i can still feel that what the hell? there's just no way the guy from 100 years ago who trainhopped around the country ever experienced that kind of pressure. it literally messed my brain up and i have no idea how to fix it for me at least the feeling hasn't gone away
- when you're on the other side it feels like you're just sitting outside of the rest of the worlds culture at this point. it can actually challenge why you left it in the first place and make you consider sacrificing your own well being just to not feel like you're not an outsider from another planet
i never did the tiktok thing so i dunno what that's like. at least leaving twitter felt like shutting a book that kinda sucked and you don't really ever think about it again
Twitter in its design has never been a platform for discussion, but for shouting into the void. And that seems to have empowered people to voice their most awful opinions because they don't see much pushback
Short messages bias toward simple slogans and memes devoid of context or nuance. It leads to “context collapse” in the discourse and the worst kind of echo chamber effects. You can’t ask for a better medium to spread rumor and disinformation.
Then, to supercharge its badness, it sorts by “engagement” which promotes the dumbest or most triggering stuff.
Think of the last point this way: two people walk past you. One says “hi.” The other strips and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken and saluting Hitler. Which of these two people maximizes engagement?
The peanut butter smeared clucking Nazi is now President. The opinions that dominate discourse everywhere are now the opinions of those types of people.
Social media is collective brain poison. Bluesky and Mastodon might be slightly less bad on the “maximizing engagement” part but they still cause the context collapse and echo chamber effects. The “microblogging” format is inherently toxic and irredeemable.
> even sometimes pivotal as a communications tool in countries experiencing civil unrest / injustice
I get why you or anyone would say that. But I assure you, it is less accountable and more disinformation than anything remotely positive or helpful. Source? Arab Spring.
Twitter, and other similar designs are parasocial mass media.
Microblogging has always felt so strange to me, I could never get into it. Why would I want to hear dozens of different short-form opinions from people? Maybe it's the 'tism, but that sounds so anxiety inducing & overwhelming.
When your follower/following count is small and you're getting to know people and build a community of people you otherwise wouldn't meet IRL, it can be a great thing. When you start getting inundated with too much information when you have 10K + followers, it can be overwhelming and you lose the signal within the noise and find that it may start affecting other parts of life. I suppose each person is different, but that burned me out and made me uninterested and I burned it all down. I found I was losing sleep checking my phone and getting unusually addicted to stupid things.
I opened it again after many years and frankly i'm seeing better content than i find on other social media platforms.
For example, instagram is clearly trying to understand what political side i lean on and pushes me that kind of content. I have to be very careful what kind of stuff i like otherwise my feed gets very polluted with political content rather than with interesting tech stuff and cats videos.
On the other hand, X/Twitter is routinely serving me better and more interesting technical content.
Except US trademark law doesn’t work like that and hence the case.
One of the core things a company needs to do to demonstrate it needs a trademark protected is that it’s actively using said trademark. If X has effectively abandoned Twitter, then it can’t really claim it still needs to protect the name.
What you’re describing is more the “Kleenex” effect where words become commonplace. In this case another company builds a platform that has “tweets.” There it’s even more important that the company with the trademark shows that they use the trademark. Here the owner has basically scrubbed the trademark from their existence hence why folks are making these claims.
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.
Nonsense. The core reason to enforce trademarks is to prove that you have it.
The yo-yo used to be a trademark too, but the problem was what else do you call it? If the "owner" of a trademark cannot defend it, they don't have it. That's how trademark law is very different than copyright (which is implicit and automatic): You can lose a trademark even if you register it and popularise it, if you can't prove that the trademark represents your actual trade.
> [I think] the trademark should hold for as long as a reasonable person can be confused by the new Twitter regardless of people's dislike towards Elon.
That's your opinion man. Thankfully the law doesn't work that way.
I don't even know whether you mean X (the new thing that was once twitter) or tweet (the new thing that claims to will-be what twitter once was)
> I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.
and that didn't help in the slightest, but domain squatting is very common on the Internet.
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.
That's something we hear often but it's not grounded in an legal reality: trademarks are purely a form of intellectual property that a person (physical or moral) can hold and it doesn't come with any attached liability: you can't hold a company accountable for violating the trust built around its brand name in past year, and the owner is free to sell the brand name to another company or change their products in a way that mislead the consumer about its quality.
In fact, should a trademark come with a promise about the quality of the product, Twitter would have lost it's trademark as soon as Elon transformed it into a disinformation machine (by breaking how the blue tick works and boosting paying account's content).
No, there is an amount of legal reality built into it. With copyright and patents, once you obtain the intellectual property, you keep it for the rest of the term no matter what you do. But with trademarks, your actions (or inaction) can cause you to lose the trademark.
The legal purpose of the trademark is to protect identifying marks for the purposes of conducting business (trade)--literally its name. The subsidiary public interest of attaching trust to that mark isn't directly protected, but failing to police the use of trademark is sufficient grounds to lose the trademark, which is why companies tend to be overly aggressive in suing people for violating the trademark.
> Failing to police the use of trademark is sufficient grounds to lose the trademark, which is why companies tend to be overly aggressive in suing people for violating the trademark.
Not quite. There is no litigation requirement to renew a trademark registration. Trademarks are in fact the only type of intellectual property that can be preserved in perpetuity.
Litigation is an attempt to prevent genericide, and might fail at that.
Trademarks can be preserved even in the absence of litigation. Cancellation cases in US law typically require evidence of abandonment and lack of evidence for intended re-uptake. Litigation is not necessary to refute abandonment.
Nothing you've written above contradicts my argument. which is that there's no liability attached to a trademark as opposed to what something made to protect the consumer would require.
The heksher marks and logos offered by kosher-certification organizations are protected by trademark; using the trademark under license specifically assures the customer that the organization's standards have been followed precisely, and using the trademark without license defeats the purpose.
Similarly, the American Halal Foundation, the USDA Organic seal, the UL logo and many other programs use the mechanism of trademark to guarantee that the product or service meets their standards.
That's the licensing agreement between the owner and the trademarks, and their customers for the use of the trademark.
But the American Halal Foundation could revise their definition of what counts as Halal, and then license the brand to a company that doesn't meet the current criteria, without asking for permission from anyone.
It's in your wording already: “the customer that the organization's standards have been followed precisely” (emphasis mine), nothing prevents the organization from changing their standards (well, maybe the licensing agreement with their customer brands does, but that's purely a contract thing and has nothing to to with the trademark per se).
Sure. But the same way it would be disingenuous to say that copyright exists so that we can have copyleft, it's a fallacy to say that trademark exist to protect the consumer, which is the point I'm arguing against:
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.
I never went (just don't like it), but for a long time it was a primary source for a lot of important things so one kinda gets exposed to it anyway indirectly and / or through embeds. But that's the filtered version, anyway.
I made the experiment some times ago: it's faster to edit the link, replace x.com with nitter.net and load the content from there, than wait until the original page load. The time difference isn't meaningful (it's less than a second), but the fact that a website loses against a manual redirection to another front end is still a spectacular proof of incompetence.
I wonder if it is by design. On Nitter, which is fast-loading and streamlined, it is trivial to ctrl-click on a bunch of commenter accounts and readily see they are bots (photo from This Person Does Not Exist, unrealistically single-issue posting, etc.). On X where things move slow as treacle, it is harder for the average person to figure that out.
Same here. There is always the "log in" nagging pop-up. But I will never log in again to the right-arm-gesture guy, so this is just time wasted for me.
We could need some decentralized way to share "tweets" though. Not linked to greedy billionaires.
Probably not many do remember, but before this logo Twitter had a different bird logo until the company was already quite big.
If I remember correctly this logo was allegedly bought from a royalty free image platform and Twitter had no exclusive rights to it. Also there was a little outcry that the original artist just received the royalty free platform usual ridiculously small one time payment.
EDIT: The one I remember is the second one in the timeline image from the following (unfortunately ad infested) article, so apparently it was not the first one they had.
Musk probably came across the shape as a child and drew it on a napkin to carry it with him, like he did with the Cybertruck design after "beating" Car Designer on either the Apple II or PC
> Also there was a little outcry that the original artist just received the royalty free platform usual ridiculously small one time payment.
I mean, if I tell you I'm to sell something to you for 5 dollars and you will be allowed to do this or that with it, and you give me the 5 dollars and then do this or that, it's a bit ridiculous to then have an "outcry" that you were successfull at doing this or that so you owe me more.
Not trying to offend but artists willing to make bird logo for cheap are a dime a dozen, which is why those site exists in the first place, and they didn't care about which one exactly which is why they went on that site to buy it; it's ot like there was any vile or unfair action being done there.
I just want to point out that if there was an outcry it wasn't by the actual (recently deceased) artist, who, according to Wikipedia, was happy to see his creation get this kind of visibility.
Personally, when companies (or movies, or albums, or books, or games, etc.) become worth enormous amounts of money I think there should be bonus royalties for everyone involved even if they sold their labor for a flat rate.
No, I don't have a good plan for how you'd calculate the distribution. But it would make windfalls more fair to the people that made them happen. And that kind of mechanism could also help fund many open source projects.
Ah, come to France, maybe that explains my "sure of myself" answer in the parent comment. 0.0*01% + "à-valoir" is very common and cover the situation described here (eg you get paid a paid royalty, in advance, if the revenue ever exceed you are owed it, but if it's always under you never have to pay back).
Sort of a "I pay you 100€ but if this turns out to be a billion euro thing you get you gold ticket too".
This is right, and the second half is what bites. Standard stock licenses generally prohibit use in a trademark or logo outright, and the extended license that permits it still gives you no exclusivity, so the image stays on sale to everyone else.
That is why logo marks get commissioned with an assignment of rights instead of bought off a stock site. You are not paying for the drawing. You are paying for nobody else being able to use it. A company that grew into a global brand on a non-exclusive stock bird got lucky that nobody claimed it first.
If a majority of people think a thing should happen, then by definition that thing should probably usually happen.
If the structure of the moment (societal norms, laws, etc) doesn't provide for it, then the outcry is the initial stage of the conversation and process where we collectively decide whether or not the structure needs to be updated. IE, figure out some new laws or legal principles to apply existing laws such that the thing the majority has decided should happen can happen.
Everything you value for yourself and consider normal today, was only the result of some outcry at some point, and at that time there were people going "oh so dramatic the outcry just ignore it"
And similarly, when an outcry is worthless, it's valuable to tell the people involved that they should shut up. Outcries don't have to be entertained and they also don't have to be tolerated.
> Also there was a little outcry that the original artist just received the royalty free platform usual ridiculously small one time payment.
Reminds me of Carolyn Davidson, Nike’s swoosh logo creator, who was paid $185 for the original design but was later given shares in Nike that ended up being worth a bit more. [1]
Is it accurate to describe this as the public domain? I would expect that the bird logo still enjoys copyright protection, independent from its status as a trademark.
The final paragraph says this, among other things:
"The court ruled on a preliminary injunction request, so it’s not the final word on the merits. Still, it seems highly likely that the TWEET term and the bird logo have been freed from X’s trademark clutches. If so, it’s nice to get some cultural assets back into the public domain"
Actually General Motors still holds the Oldsmobile trademark and renewed it in April of last year. They don't have to sell cars to keep it, as they still sell parts related to the vehicles alongside merchandise that carries the brand's name. You still have to get a license from General Motors to feature the Oldsmobile 442 in your videogame for example.
General Motors LLC ("New GM") still holds five trademarks on OLDSMOBILE, but they're all for merch, not cars. Trademark classes are hub caps, apparel, catalogs, badge holders, and metal banks. The trademark for the automobile class, 74138034, was cancelled in 2016 for failure to file a declaration of use.
It always made more sense to call these tiny texts as "tweets" rather than "toots" (mastodon) or "status update" (generic) so it would be good having the right to use that term as public domain.
"did you see what the president just microblogged"?
come now, surely you understand why it would be beneficial to the commons to have a snappy, catchy term that already has purchase in the public imagination be free to use, right?
But people (around me at least) feel bad when they have to compose an entire sentence full of words without any brand names or corporate names inside. They feel like being separated from their mother or like they lost basic orientation when not in each sentence there is "an uber", or "my instagram", or "a youtuber", "a whatsapp", ..., ..., ...
The email signature of my former landlord was like that:
.....
Phone: 012345
I-Phone: 543210
Funnily, that wasn't some US girlie, but a German grandma. Maybe she got some bad US food on some journey and it made her brain rot away. Yessss, of course, as a bonus, it's a somewhat uncommon way spelling... But, yeah...
The "phone" is probably landline or old 2G phone, iphone is internet connected smartphone (extra whatsapp etc).
I remember having troubles voice calling iphone users, because of some roaming data bs, their device would not correctly fallback to 2g voice call on bad 4g connection, it tried to use data everywhere (voice call would just get ignored).
Plus imessage does not correctly use sms protocol, instead tries to use internet and apples bs extensions. With bad connectivity it means sms will not reliably work on iphones!
Super relevant in germany and their shitty 4g networks!!!
Heeey, our mobile networks are much less shitty than our railway services! :)
Anyways, in such cases, I would try to get more competent hardware, instead of proudly advertize it in my email signature. Also, yeah, she was as competent as our mobile networks or our railway. When I subscribed the contract, she was making fun of another tenant who failed transferring money and then came with lame excuses like 'the bank account number was invalid'. In a very unfriendly German rich grandma way of making fun. Turned out when I tried to transfer the first rent: The bank account number was invalid... Well... At least she was precise with the mobile phone she had (not so much with its spelling, though). :)
Looks like there is now a tweet.new (not the same as twitter.com ) run by Project Bluebird (not the same as Bluesky). Very confusing.
The "Trust Dial" seems a new concept to be fair. Then again, it's just a concept and possibly AI generated like the rest of the page. I wonder what trust score would the website assign to itself at that point.
Decision from the judge "Issuance of the injunction precluding Bluebird's use of the Twitter-formative marks is contingent on X Corp.'s posting of a $500,000 bond."
Both X Corp. and Bluebird have asked to go to court on Nov 2027.
Surely by literally saying "formerly Twitter", this is an admission of non-use, thus invalidating the trademark on the term as it is not just "not used for anything" but is explicitly being distanced from by X in writing.
Not really. Think of all of the corporate rebrandings of product lines for a future one to re-use that name.
Ex. Google Wallet -> Android Pay -> Google Pay -> Google Wallet [1]
A big difference here is that X has been pretty clear on it has no intent to launch a product called Twitter. I doubt you can find similar statements from Google saying they'd never launch a Google Wallet after the Android Pay rebrand.
Those include the name of the company and actively marketed product. If Google rebranded to Winklemoops, and Android get renamed to Callithing, then the "Google" and "Android" trademarks would eventually expire due to trademarks being contingent on actual use. So yeah, "Google Wallet" and "Android Pay" would eventually become perfectly valid names for someone else to claim.
And Twitter being renamed to X is literally that: the company and product name were changed, and both the company and product no longer uses that original name for anything other than to call out "formerly Twitter". That is not "use" for the purposes of keeping your trademark.
I can't figure out if renaming Twitter to X is the stupidest branding decision I've ever encountered or if it's bloody brilliant.
Every time Danish media talks about X, they say "The social media X". So X in itself is completely unrecognizable, you actively have to mention that you're talking about the social media platform. That's is however also rather genius, because now the connection between X and "social media" is strengthened every time it's mentioned.
It's stupid. Every normal (ie not terminally online) person I speak to calls it twitter and is confused if I call it X. For some reason most of them think an "x post" is on instagram too. I guess because influencers call crossposting that?
Pretty sure lots of people would read x post as cross post, not just influencers. ‘X’ to stand in for cross is a fairly old convention; I think I’ve seen 19th century examples.
If you do it in person you have to say X with a slight look of disgust in your face, to let them know what you're talking about.
Most people I know only knows about X/Twitter from the news cycle, it's not something they themselves use, it's just the platform used by journalists, politicians and commentators. It's not a place normal people go.
> That's is however also rather genius, because now the connection between X and "social media" is strengthened every time it's mentioned.
If that was true we'd be getting closer to a point where you could mention "X" without having to further specify what you're talking about, which doesn't seem to be happening any time soon. Maybe more to the point, "Twitter" already had that instant association that Musk totally threw away.
But I actually think changing the branding of the platform was far less dumb than the related necessary changing of terminology associated with using the platform. Twitter managed to associate a unique word for posting on their platform, "tweet", that became widely used and an instantly recognizable reference to using their social media platform specifically even if you didn't mention their name. You could "post" any of a dozen places, you could only "tweet" on Twitter. That's the kind of branding that doesn't happen often and a company would kill for, and Musk threw it away in favor of the same "post" terminology that literally every competitor also uses.
It is easily one of the most stupid and arrogant business decisions in history. The Twitter brand was easily worth billions and changing to X wiped out an estimated $4 billion to $20 billion in brand value overnight.
the "new" Twitter basically looks like a cash/name grab, I was disappointed to see that nobody involved in it was affiliated the Twitter, and it's mostly run by non-technical/lawyer types.
I remember when people were called racist just for asking more border control. What's the new definition now?
My point is that this term has been used so loosely, it has lost its meaning. Racist used to be someone who really despised black/brown people. Now every Trump voter is apparently a racist.
> My point is that this term has been used so loosely, it has lost its meaning.
Have you taken a look at X/Twitter lately? There is a lot of out and out racism. Don't give the benefit of the doubt that it's just people who want "border control".
The definition of racist border control includes deporting X00,000 brown people, some of whom had lawful status, and having virtually every one of the 10k refugee admissions be white South African.
The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name. So the trademark should hold for as long as a reasonable person can be confused by the new Twitter regardless of people's dislike towards Elon.
I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.
I just stopped using twitter and I've not actually felt like I've missed out
I'm even cooler. I never used it.
Also, I don't watch TV and only smoke menthols. I mean vape. Or whatever.
People thought twitter was pretty cool at SxSW in 2007, I didn't go to Austin that time but heard about it plenty.
Been waiting ever since to see if it would become worthwile for me, or even stand the test of time.
X marks the spot where it seemed to achieve arrested development, so not holding my breath.
edit: have a corrective upvote while I'm at it :)
as it turns out short form stream of conscious rambling was sometimes funny sometimes interesting even sometimes pivotal as a communications tool in countries experiencing civil unrest / injustice. but in its current stage and the state of all social media at this point one wonders why anyone pretends twitter is what it was a decade ago. it just isn't, it could also disappear tomorrow and things probably might even get a little better for the world given how much of a vehicle it is to amplify division. i remember like i dunno 5-6 years ago when the people in my life started to wean themselves off twitter and i smoked a lot of cope to justify why i was still on it. can't even remember when i stopped using it but again... nothing of value was lost. feels like a fever dream i always thought i had to be tuned the hell in theres just no way that's good for anyone's brain.
instagram/facebook over my 20s left some real mental scars though im still trying to sort what the f those apps did to me and to culture at large. i quit instagram like 3 years ago, the classic millenial exploration of pruning your life of shite things to lower the anxiety. the scars i am still stuck with, and mind you i literally don't have these apps anymore:
- i still feel this soft pressure that anything i do doesn't matter unless there is a witness (a post, a story, etc). that is insane. it's been three years and i can still feel that what the hell? there's just no way the guy from 100 years ago who trainhopped around the country ever experienced that kind of pressure. it literally messed my brain up and i have no idea how to fix it for me at least the feeling hasn't gone away
- when you're on the other side it feels like you're just sitting outside of the rest of the worlds culture at this point. it can actually challenge why you left it in the first place and make you consider sacrificing your own well being just to not feel like you're not an outsider from another planet
i never did the tiktok thing so i dunno what that's like. at least leaving twitter felt like shutting a book that kinda sucked and you don't really ever think about it again
Twitter in its design has never been a platform for discussion, but for shouting into the void. And that seems to have empowered people to voice their most awful opinions because they don't see much pushback
It’s worse than that.
Short messages bias toward simple slogans and memes devoid of context or nuance. It leads to “context collapse” in the discourse and the worst kind of echo chamber effects. You can’t ask for a better medium to spread rumor and disinformation.
Then, to supercharge its badness, it sorts by “engagement” which promotes the dumbest or most triggering stuff.
Think of the last point this way: two people walk past you. One says “hi.” The other strips and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken and saluting Hitler. Which of these two people maximizes engagement?
The peanut butter smeared clucking Nazi is now President. The opinions that dominate discourse everywhere are now the opinions of those types of people.
Social media is collective brain poison. Bluesky and Mastodon might be slightly less bad on the “maximizing engagement” part but they still cause the context collapse and echo chamber effects. The “microblogging” format is inherently toxic and irredeemable.
> even sometimes pivotal as a communications tool in countries experiencing civil unrest / injustice
I get why you or anyone would say that. But I assure you, it is less accountable and more disinformation than anything remotely positive or helpful. Source? Arab Spring.
Twitter, and other similar designs are parasocial mass media.
I’ve never used any microblogging platform and feel like I’ve never missed out. :)
Microblogging has always felt so strange to me, I could never get into it. Why would I want to hear dozens of different short-form opinions from people? Maybe it's the 'tism, but that sounds so anxiety inducing & overwhelming.
When your follower/following count is small and you're getting to know people and build a community of people you otherwise wouldn't meet IRL, it can be a great thing. When you start getting inundated with too much information when you have 10K + followers, it can be overwhelming and you lose the signal within the noise and find that it may start affecting other parts of life. I suppose each person is different, but that burned me out and made me uninterested and I burned it all down. I found I was losing sleep checking my phone and getting unusually addicted to stupid things.
Twitter was best when I followed comedians, record labels and venues.
(And I should note I left in 2017 when even the funny people couldn’t get a grip on what was happening online)
This is what short form posting was meant for. Jokes and quips from witty people and announcements for things I care about.
That Twitter became a primary source of news for anyone is a major indicator of the decline of civilization
politics and hack takes abound, but there were some legitimately funny people on twitter (some of whom've migrated to other platforms).
mostly bad, though.
Don't know why yer downvoted because this is for real and winning at life.
I opened it again after many years and frankly i'm seeing better content than i find on other social media platforms.
For example, instagram is clearly trying to understand what political side i lean on and pushes me that kind of content. I have to be very careful what kind of stuff i like otherwise my feed gets very polluted with political content rather than with interesting tech stuff and cats videos.
On the other hand, X/Twitter is routinely serving me better and more interesting technical content.
Im so cool that the only social network I use is hacker News and I don't even use that - I use hckrnews.com!
I'm the opposite. Ignored it for so long, and had only signed up post-acquistion.
Why would you do that to yourself?
Except US trademark law doesn’t work like that and hence the case.
One of the core things a company needs to do to demonstrate it needs a trademark protected is that it’s actively using said trademark. If X has effectively abandoned Twitter, then it can’t really claim it still needs to protect the name.
What you’re describing is more the “Kleenex” effect where words become commonplace. In this case another company builds a platform that has “tweets.” There it’s even more important that the company with the trademark shows that they use the trademark. Here the owner has basically scrubbed the trademark from their existence hence why folks are making these claims.
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.
Nonsense. The core reason to enforce trademarks is to prove that you have it.
The yo-yo used to be a trademark too, but the problem was what else do you call it? If the "owner" of a trademark cannot defend it, they don't have it. That's how trademark law is very different than copyright (which is implicit and automatic): You can lose a trademark even if you register it and popularise it, if you can't prove that the trademark represents your actual trade.
> [I think] the trademark should hold for as long as a reasonable person can be confused by the new Twitter regardless of people's dislike towards Elon.
That's your opinion man. Thankfully the law doesn't work that way.
I don't even know whether you mean X (the new thing that was once twitter) or tweet (the new thing that claims to will-be what twitter once was)
> I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.
and that didn't help in the slightest, but domain squatting is very common on the Internet.
yeah thats what it boils down to as long as they are using twitter.com. They are also using the twitter trademark.
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.
That's something we hear often but it's not grounded in an legal reality: trademarks are purely a form of intellectual property that a person (physical or moral) can hold and it doesn't come with any attached liability: you can't hold a company accountable for violating the trust built around its brand name in past year, and the owner is free to sell the brand name to another company or change their products in a way that mislead the consumer about its quality.
In fact, should a trademark come with a promise about the quality of the product, Twitter would have lost it's trademark as soon as Elon transformed it into a disinformation machine (by breaking how the blue tick works and boosting paying account's content).
No, there is an amount of legal reality built into it. With copyright and patents, once you obtain the intellectual property, you keep it for the rest of the term no matter what you do. But with trademarks, your actions (or inaction) can cause you to lose the trademark.
The legal purpose of the trademark is to protect identifying marks for the purposes of conducting business (trade)--literally its name. The subsidiary public interest of attaching trust to that mark isn't directly protected, but failing to police the use of trademark is sufficient grounds to lose the trademark, which is why companies tend to be overly aggressive in suing people for violating the trademark.
> Failing to police the use of trademark is sufficient grounds to lose the trademark, which is why companies tend to be overly aggressive in suing people for violating the trademark.
Not quite. There is no litigation requirement to renew a trademark registration. Trademarks are in fact the only type of intellectual property that can be preserved in perpetuity.
Litigation is an attempt to prevent genericide, and might fail at that.
Trademarks can be preserved even in the absence of litigation. Cancellation cases in US law typically require evidence of abandonment and lack of evidence for intended re-uptake. Litigation is not necessary to refute abandonment.
Nothing you've written above contradicts my argument. which is that there's no liability attached to a trademark as opposed to what something made to protect the consumer would require.
is-ought distinction, but specifically:
The heksher marks and logos offered by kosher-certification organizations are protected by trademark; using the trademark under license specifically assures the customer that the organization's standards have been followed precisely, and using the trademark without license defeats the purpose.
Similarly, the American Halal Foundation, the USDA Organic seal, the UL logo and many other programs use the mechanism of trademark to guarantee that the product or service meets their standards.
That's the licensing agreement between the owner and the trademarks, and their customers for the use of the trademark.
But the American Halal Foundation could revise their definition of what counts as Halal, and then license the brand to a company that doesn't meet the current criteria, without asking for permission from anyone.
It's in your wording already: “the customer that the organization's standards have been followed precisely” (emphasis mine), nothing prevents the organization from changing their standards (well, maybe the licensing agreement with their customer brands does, but that's purely a contract thing and has nothing to to with the trademark per se).
Trademark is the mechanism of enforcement for this usage, just as copyright is the mechanism of enforcement for the GPL.
You can come up with other mechanisms that would work, but this is the one that we have in existence now.
Sure. But the same way it would be disingenuous to say that copyright exists so that we can have copyleft, it's a fallacy to say that trademark exist to protect the consumer, which is the point I'm arguing against:
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.
I stopped going. Between the spam and the racist unmoderated AI slop cannon that is discovery there, what's the point
I never went (just don't like it), but for a long time it was a primary source for a lot of important things so one kinda gets exposed to it anyway indirectly and / or through embeds. But that's the filtered version, anyway.
I don’t even open twitter/x links anymore because the page is so unusable.
I made the experiment some times ago: it's faster to edit the link, replace x.com with nitter.net and load the content from there, than wait until the original page load. The time difference isn't meaningful (it's less than a second), but the fact that a website loses against a manual redirection to another front end is still a spectacular proof of incompetence.
I found a Firefox plugin which does an automatic redirect to XCancel.
I wonder if it is by design. On Nitter, which is fast-loading and streamlined, it is trivial to ctrl-click on a bunch of commenter accounts and readily see they are bots (photo from This Person Does Not Exist, unrealistically single-issue posting, etc.). On X where things move slow as treacle, it is harder for the average person to figure that out.
Same here. There is always the "log in" nagging pop-up. But I will never log in again to the right-arm-gesture guy, so this is just time wasted for me.
We could need some decentralized way to share "tweets" though. Not linked to greedy billionaires.
fb and insta have the same annoying login screens too. seems like most of the web does these days.
If you want to share tweets from X, there is exactly that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283
Recently found textlog.cc here on HN. At times it felt (the content especially) like the early days of twitter.
Probably not many do remember, but before this logo Twitter had a different bird logo until the company was already quite big.
If I remember correctly this logo was allegedly bought from a royalty free image platform and Twitter had no exclusive rights to it. Also there was a little outcry that the original artist just received the royalty free platform usual ridiculously small one time payment.
EDIT: The one I remember is the second one in the timeline image from the following (unfortunately ad infested) article, so apparently it was not the first one they had.
https://www.afaqs.com/news/digital/has-musk-gone-too-far-wit...
I think that image really visualises how bad the x logo is
https://img-cdn.thepublive.com/filters:format(webp)/afaqs/me...
The original logos weren't great but they were more charming than X
2009 was kind of a bizarre intermission. Don’t remember that at all, though I was certainly using Twitter at that point.
The "X" logo twitter uses these days looks like someone bought an x11 logo from temu.
Musk probably drew it himself
He took it from a tweet https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1683310992493608960
Wasn't it basically the X11 window system logo?
It's confusingly similar (by the "average person" metric( but I don't think it's identical
The average person has absolutely never heard of X11.
The average person has absolutely no need to know what X11 is to compare the visual appearance of 2 images.
Buc-ee's has won infringement suits against far less confusing logos.
It's an X from the blackboard bold range in Unicode.
U+1D54F, MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X
https://apps.timwhitlock.info/unicode/inspect?s=%F0%9D%95%8F
$ \mathbb{X} $
I don't think he'd be able to come up with this.
Musk probably came across the shape as a child and drew it on a napkin to carry it with him, like he did with the Cybertruck design after "beating" Car Designer on either the Apple II or PC
Simon Oxley designed quite a few of the most well known animal logos in the tech world today including GitHub's Octocat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Oxley
> Also there was a little outcry that the original artist just received the royalty free platform usual ridiculously small one time payment.
I mean, if I tell you I'm to sell something to you for 5 dollars and you will be allowed to do this or that with it, and you give me the 5 dollars and then do this or that, it's a bit ridiculous to then have an "outcry" that you were successfull at doing this or that so you owe me more.
Not trying to offend but artists willing to make bird logo for cheap are a dime a dozen, which is why those site exists in the first place, and they didn't care about which one exactly which is why they went on that site to buy it; it's ot like there was any vile or unfair action being done there.
I just want to point out that if there was an outcry it wasn't by the actual (recently deceased) artist, who, according to Wikipedia, was happy to see his creation get this kind of visibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Oxley#Twitter_Bird_Logo_...
Personally, when companies (or movies, or albums, or books, or games, etc.) become worth enormous amounts of money I think there should be bonus royalties for everyone involved even if they sold their labor for a flat rate.
No, I don't have a good plan for how you'd calculate the distribution. But it would make windfalls more fair to the people that made them happen. And that kind of mechanism could also help fund many open source projects.
You can just add this to your contract if you think there's a good shot at success.
Apparently, in this case, the license _did_ in fact forbid this usage, which is why they changed logo in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Oxley#Twitter_Bird_Logo_...
You can also be a generous person, and share a few pennies from your pocket.
No one wants to deal with a 0.0001% or 0.00001% royalty clause in an individual contact.
Ah, come to France, maybe that explains my "sure of myself" answer in the parent comment. 0.0*01% + "à-valoir" is very common and cover the situation described here (eg you get paid a paid royalty, in advance, if the revenue ever exceed you are owed it, but if it's always under you never have to pay back).
Sort of a "I pay you 100€ but if this turns out to be a billion euro thing you get you gold ticket too".
A lot of the royalty free images I have bought prohibit using the imagery as part of the logo for a company.
But maybe the platform where the bird graphic was sold did not say any such thing in the licensing terms. In which case, tough luck to the artist.
And on the other hand, if there were such terms agains using the graphic as your logo then the artist should have sued and gotten a sizeable payment.
This is right, and the second half is what bites. Standard stock licenses generally prohibit use in a trademark or logo outright, and the extended license that permits it still gives you no exclusivity, so the image stays on sale to everyone else.
That is why logo marks get commissioned with an assignment of rights instead of bought off a stock site. You are not paying for the drawing. You are paying for nobody else being able to use it. A company that grew into a global brand on a non-exclusive stock bird got lucky that nobody claimed it first.
Not all outcries have to be entertained.
Outcries are just collective action.
If a majority of people think a thing should happen, then by definition that thing should probably usually happen.
If the structure of the moment (societal norms, laws, etc) doesn't provide for it, then the outcry is the initial stage of the conversation and process where we collectively decide whether or not the structure needs to be updated. IE, figure out some new laws or legal principles to apply existing laws such that the thing the majority has decided should happen can happen.
Everything you value for yourself and consider normal today, was only the result of some outcry at some point, and at that time there were people going "oh so dramatic the outcry just ignore it"
And similarly, when an outcry is worthless, it's valuable to tell the people involved that they should shut up. Outcries don't have to be entertained and they also don't have to be tolerated.
> Also there was a little outcry that the original artist just received the royalty free platform usual ridiculously small one time payment.
Reminds me of Carolyn Davidson, Nike’s swoosh logo creator, who was paid $185 for the original design but was later given shares in Nike that ended up being worth a bit more. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Davidson_(graphic_desi...
Is it accurate to describe this as the public domain? I would expect that the bird logo still enjoys copyright protection, independent from its status as a trademark.
The final paragraph says this, among other things:
"The court ruled on a preliminary injunction request, so it’s not the final word on the merits. Still, it seems highly likely that the TWEET term and the bird logo have been freed from X’s trademark clutches. If so, it’s nice to get some cultural assets back into the public domain"
Seems kind of dubious to say the least.
No
Related:
"Twitter Is Back at Twitter.now" 26.aug.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49455791 19 comments
"New Twitter rebrands to Tweet.app after court's double-edged ruling" 06.sep.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49581979
"Twitter" 10.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223543 11 comments
"Former Twitter Attorney Files for 'Twitter' Trademark" 09.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208672 13 comments
"US startup seeks to reclaim Twitter trademarks 'abandoned' by Musk's X" 09.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203468
Trademarks are use it or lose it. OLDSMOBILE, for example, is a cancelled General Motors trademark for automobiles.[1] No cars sold, no trademark.
Actually General Motors still holds the Oldsmobile trademark and renewed it in April of last year. They don't have to sell cars to keep it, as they still sell parts related to the vehicles alongside merchandise that carries the brand's name. You still have to get a license from General Motors to feature the Oldsmobile 442 in your videogame for example.
General Motors LLC ("New GM") still holds five trademarks on OLDSMOBILE, but they're all for merch, not cars. Trademark classes are hub caps, apparel, catalogs, badge holders, and metal banks. The trademark for the automobile class, 74138034, was cancelled in 2016 for failure to file a declaration of use.
It always made more sense to call these tiny texts as "tweets" rather than "toots" (mastodon) or "status update" (generic) so it would be good having the right to use that term as public domain.
There have been worse names for this kind of updates in the past. At some point in time was common to "finger" someone online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)
Mastodon and X both switched to “posts”. Toots was the old name.
Which has been the correct name since before Twitter existed. You can also use "message", or "comment" if its in reply to something else.
Yep, and didn't work.
In what way? I haven’t seen someone say “toot” in a very long time. Tweet I did but that was arguably more entrenched in pop culture over the years.
I guess it depends on what community/bubble are you in. Many fediverse users I know have always been, and will always be tooting.
Some fun history on the origin of ‘tweet’:
https://furbo.org/2013/06/28/the-origin-of-tweet/
Do you have to finger them before you poke them?
<smoking emoji>
Microblogging.
That's the original term.
"did you see what the president just microblogged"?
come now, surely you understand why it would be beneficial to the commons to have a snappy, catchy term that already has purchase in the public imagination be free to use, right?
Okay, what other catchy term instead of "president" would you suggest?
King?
Pedophile?
But people (around me at least) feel bad when they have to compose an entire sentence full of words without any brand names or corporate names inside. They feel like being separated from their mother or like they lost basic orientation when not in each sentence there is "an uber", or "my instagram", or "a youtuber", "a whatsapp", ..., ..., ...
The email signature of my former landlord was like that:
..... Phone: 012345 I-Phone: 543210
Funnily, that wasn't some US girlie, but a German grandma. Maybe she got some bad US food on some journey and it made her brain rot away. Yessss, of course, as a bonus, it's a somewhat uncommon way spelling... But, yeah...
The "phone" is probably landline or old 2G phone, iphone is internet connected smartphone (extra whatsapp etc).
I remember having troubles voice calling iphone users, because of some roaming data bs, their device would not correctly fallback to 2g voice call on bad 4g connection, it tried to use data everywhere (voice call would just get ignored).
Plus imessage does not correctly use sms protocol, instead tries to use internet and apples bs extensions. With bad connectivity it means sms will not reliably work on iphones!
Super relevant in germany and their shitty 4g networks!!!
Heeey, our mobile networks are much less shitty than our railway services! :)
Anyways, in such cases, I would try to get more competent hardware, instead of proudly advertize it in my email signature. Also, yeah, she was as competent as our mobile networks or our railway. When I subscribed the contract, she was making fun of another tenant who failed transferring money and then came with lame excuses like 'the bank account number was invalid'. In a very unfriendly German rich grandma way of making fun. Turned out when I tried to transfer the first rent: The bank account number was invalid... Well... At least she was precise with the mobile phone she had (not so much with its spelling, though). :)
> Heeey, our mobile networks are much less shitty than our railway services! :)
Still mediocre compared to nearby countries.
The brand name version from back in the day was calling them twits.
Let tweeting ring free.
Looks like there is now a tweet.new (not the same as twitter.com ) run by Project Bluebird (not the same as Bluesky). Very confusing.
The "Trust Dial" seems a new concept to be fair. Then again, it's just a concept and possibly AI generated like the rest of the page. I wonder what trust score would the website assign to itself at that point.
tweet.app. Tweet.new, confusingly, is a redirect to Twitter.
Thanks! Can't edit the grandparent comment now. Then again, this just proves how confusing this really is.
twitter.new --> redirects to --> tweet.app
Decision from the judge "Issuance of the injunction precluding Bluebird's use of the Twitter-formative marks is contingent on X Corp.'s posting of a $500,000 bond."
Both X Corp. and Bluebird have asked to go to court on Nov 2027.
Surely by literally saying "formerly Twitter", this is an admission of non-use, thus invalidating the trademark on the term as it is not just "not used for anything" but is explicitly being distanced from by X in writing.
Not really. Think of all of the corporate rebrandings of product lines for a future one to re-use that name.
Ex. Google Wallet -> Android Pay -> Google Pay -> Google Wallet [1]
A big difference here is that X has been pretty clear on it has no intent to launch a product called Twitter. I doubt you can find similar statements from Google saying they'd never launch a Google Wallet after the Android Pay rebrand.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wallet
Those include the name of the company and actively marketed product. If Google rebranded to Winklemoops, and Android get renamed to Callithing, then the "Google" and "Android" trademarks would eventually expire due to trademarks being contingent on actual use. So yeah, "Google Wallet" and "Android Pay" would eventually become perfectly valid names for someone else to claim.
And Twitter being renamed to X is literally that: the company and product name were changed, and both the company and product no longer uses that original name for anything other than to call out "formerly Twitter". That is not "use" for the purposes of keeping your trademark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_U5a097HPU - norm
Norm Macdonald: I remember the good old days when tweeting meant ...
Has anyone actually signed up to tweet.app (twitter.now)? Thoughts?
A lapsed trademark can still be under copyright, right?
A small, but nonetheless strategically important, defeat for the billionaire Elon "my right arm constantly twitches into a straight arm" musky Musk.
This reminds me of a certain Southpark episode...
I won't repeat it here but Cartman getting updates from Alec Baldwin is easily one of their all time greatest bits.
Bluesky could do the funniest April Fools
I remember when there was a big wave towards bluesky, mastodon and threads. Here we are, every day twitter/x is on the front page.
On the front page for the latest footgun incident? IMO, bluesky is doing great, BTW.
I can't figure out if renaming Twitter to X is the stupidest branding decision I've ever encountered or if it's bloody brilliant.
Every time Danish media talks about X, they say "The social media X". So X in itself is completely unrecognizable, you actively have to mention that you're talking about the social media platform. That's is however also rather genius, because now the connection between X and "social media" is strengthened every time it's mentioned.
It's stupid. Every normal (ie not terminally online) person I speak to calls it twitter and is confused if I call it X. For some reason most of them think an "x post" is on instagram too. I guess because influencers call crossposting that?
Pretty sure lots of people would read x post as cross post, not just influencers. ‘X’ to stand in for cross is a fairly old convention; I think I’ve seen 19th century examples.
X for cross has very old pedigree, dating back at least to Victorian railway stations, such as King's X.
If you do it in person you have to say X with a slight look of disgust in your face, to let them know what you're talking about.
Most people I know only knows about X/Twitter from the news cycle, it's not something they themselves use, it's just the platform used by journalists, politicians and commentators. It's not a place normal people go.
> That's is however also rather genius, because now the connection between X and "social media" is strengthened every time it's mentioned.
If that was true we'd be getting closer to a point where you could mention "X" without having to further specify what you're talking about, which doesn't seem to be happening any time soon. Maybe more to the point, "Twitter" already had that instant association that Musk totally threw away.
But I actually think changing the branding of the platform was far less dumb than the related necessary changing of terminology associated with using the platform. Twitter managed to associate a unique word for posting on their platform, "tweet", that became widely used and an instantly recognizable reference to using their social media platform specifically even if you didn't mention their name. You could "post" any of a dozen places, you could only "tweet" on Twitter. That's the kind of branding that doesn't happen often and a company would kill for, and Musk threw it away in favor of the same "post" terminology that literally every competitor also uses.
In German media, they always have a little "X (formerly Twitter)" thing. The rebrand is completely ridiculous.
Right, because there was always such a weak connection between Twitter and "social media".
It's a patently boneheaded branding decision, there's no way to spin it as even potentially smart.
German editorialized media always refers to it as a Short Message Service (Der Kurznachrichtendienst "X").
It is easily one of the most stupid and arrogant business decisions in history. The Twitter brand was easily worth billions and changing to X wiped out an estimated $4 billion to $20 billion in brand value overnight.
"The service formerly known as Twitter"...
the "new" Twitter basically looks like a cash/name grab, I was disappointed to see that nobody involved in it was affiliated the Twitter, and it's mostly run by non-technical/lawyer types.
When did twitter became the place where presidents share news?
What did they do before it?
Somewhere in Obama's time, and before that they did it on TV press releases (as they still do) or announcements on Whitehouse.gov
not really different from how any group shared news before Twitter
[flagged]
Yes, but what does that have to do with the article?
I remember when people were called racist just for asking more border control. What's the new definition now?
My point is that this term has been used so loosely, it has lost its meaning. Racist used to be someone who really despised black/brown people. Now every Trump voter is apparently a racist.
> My point is that this term has been used so loosely, it has lost its meaning.
Have you taken a look at X/Twitter lately? There is a lot of out and out racism. Don't give the benefit of the doubt that it's just people who want "border control".
In the same vein, dont assume that anything negative said about a group of people is racism.
The definition of racist border control includes deporting X00,000 brown people, some of whom had lawful status, and having virtually every one of the 10k refugee admissions be white South African.