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Musk closing in on chaos, Microsoft owns "X" for some things and META owns it for others [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-07-24
More than a couple of items about intellectual property and narcissistic decision making about rebranding
There's a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody," said trademark attorney…
Elon about to learn that having a letter fetish and an old domain does not establish defensible intellectual property.
Microsoft since 2003 has owned an X trademark related to communications about its Xbox video-game system. Meta Platforms - whose Threads platform is a new Twitter rival - owns a federal trademark registered in 2019 covering a blue-and-white letter "X" for fields including software and social media.
Meta and Microsoft likely would not sue unless they feel threatened that Twitter's X encroaches on brand equity they built in the letter, Gerben said.
The three companies did not respond to requests for comment.
Meta itself drew intellectual property challenges when it changed its name from Facebook. It faces trademark lawsuits filed last year by investment firm Metacapital and virtual-reality company MetaX, and settled another over its new infinity-symbol logo.
And if Musk succeeds in changing the name, others still could claim 'X' for themselves.
"Given the difficulty in protecting a single letter, especially one as popular commercially as 'X', Twitter's protection is likely to be confined to very similar graphics to their X logo," said Douglas Masters, a trademark attorney at law firm Loeb & Loeb.
"The logo does not have much distinctive about it, so the protection will be very narrow."
www.reuters.com/...
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