“Tweet” and the bird logo apparently enter the public domain

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.

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.

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).

https://img-cdn.thepublive.com/filters:format(webp)/afaqs/me...

The original logos weren't great but they were more charming than X

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.

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...

"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.

https://furbo.org/2013/06/28/the-origin-of-tweet/

<smoking emoji>

That's the original term.

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

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's a patently boneheaded branding decision, there's no way to spin it as even potentially smart.

not really different from how any group shared news before Twitter

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.