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.
> 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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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"
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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).
I just stopped using twitter and I've not actually felt like I've missed out
I stopped going. Between the spam and the racist unmoderated AI slop cannon that is discovery there, what's the point
I don’t even open twitter/x links anymore because the page is so unusable.
6 replies →
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.
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.
Musk probably drew it himself
6 replies →
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.
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.
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_...
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.
Not all outcries have to be entertained.
1 reply →
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.
Related:
"Twitter Is Back at Twitter.now" 26.aug.2026 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.
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.
Yep, and didn't work.
2 replies →
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?
3 replies →
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...
3 replies →
This reminds me of a certain Southpark episode...
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.
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.
"The service formerly known as Twitter"...
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.
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.
In German media, they always have a little "X (formerly Twitter)" thing. The rebrand is completely ridiculous.
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.
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.
A small, but nonetheless strategically important, defeat for the billionaire Elon "my right arm constantly twitches into a straight arm" musky Musk.
[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".
2 replies →