X's trademark rights abandoned: New social network to be called "Twitter"
Two years ago, Elon Musk renamed Twitter to X, after which he made it clear that he had no interest in the brand. A competitor is now demanding it.
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A US company has asked the United States Patent and Trademark Office to cancel all rights to the "Twitter" brand and the term "Tweet" so that they can be used by a new social network. This is according to the "request for cancellation" that the Reuters news agency has made public. It was filed by the company "Operation Bluebird," which wants to launch an internet service under "twitter.new". After the renaming of the original Twitter to X, the company of US billionaire Elon Musk "eradicated" the terms in question from all products, services, and advertising and has "no intention of resuming use of the trademarks," the request states.
Musk himself announced his departure
To support its argument, Bluebird refers, among other things, to a tweet from Elon Musk in which he announced his departure from the Twitter brand more than two years ago. Days later, the name was changed, the logo at the company headquarters was replaced, and Twitter subsequently became X. In the spring of 2024, Musk then declared that all core systems were now running on X.com. The microblogging service has not renewed the trademark rights and has even let several expire, it continues. The request was filed last week, and Reuters received no comment from X.
Speaking to Reuters, the trademark attorney responsible for the request, Stephen Coates, stated that the matter was "simple." X had ceased commercial use of the trademarks and had "legitimately abandoned" them. On LinkedIn, he further explains that it is not about nostalgia but about fixing something that is broken. In true Elon Musk fashion, he calls the old Twitter the public marketplace worth fighting for. An uninvolved expert told Reuters that X would likely have difficulty defending the rights to "Twitter" and "Tweet" as they are no longer in use. The service might, however, prevent commercial use. The question of whether Musk even wants to defend the trademark rights is interesting.
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Musk took over Twitter in the fall of 2022 after some back and forth for 44 billion US dollars. Chaotic weeks and months followed on the social network, which was repeatedly abandoned by particularly active users in favor of numerous alternatives. Nevertheless, it took over two years for Threads from Meta to reach the user numbers of the now renamed social network. Meanwhile, there are repeated calls to leave the social network, not least because of Elon Musk's behavior, for example, at the beginning of the year by the Federal Commissioner for Anti-Discrimination. heise online has not been active there for a year.
(mho)
