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X counters Operation Bluebird’s bid to claim the Twitter trademark - 9to5Mac
In response to a recent trademark petition claiming X had abandoned the Twitter name, the company updated its Terms of Service today.
9to5mac.com
Someone is trying to cancel the twitter trademark so it can be used for a new social network. The link is to a story about a change in terms and conditions on X to allegedly try and counter that.
That wouldn’t work.
To keep a trademark, you have to use it in commerce to denote goods or services. You can’t just horde it. I may not have all the facts, but this may be a textbook case of trademark abandonment as it appears X has made it quite clear they won’t use “twitter” and don’t want it used in connection with the X platform. There may be some leeway here for X because twitter is arguably sufficiently famous that there could be a likelihood of consumer confusion, but we’ll see (the relevance of which is more apparent when you realize that trademark law is really part of unfair competition law). One of the interesting things about trademark law is it is largely is state-based. While there are also federal trademark laws, a lot fo the time you get weird results because of how these different regimes interplay.
Anyway, I always assumed it was named X only because a swastika isn’t a letter of the alphabet and X is as close as you can get.
