With Elon Musk rebranding social media giant Twitter as X, experts fear that the move could invite lawsuits over the trademark. Tech behemoths including Twitter’s archrival Meta and Microsoft already have intellectual property rights to the letter, X.
Extensively cited in trademarks, the English alphabet is a candidate for legal complications and Musk’s company might struggle to defend the new brand in the future.
"There's a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody," Reuters quoted trademark attorney Josh Gerben as saying. The lawyer said there were around 900 active trademark registrations for the letter in the US.
According to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Meta applied for a trademark on its "X" logo in May 2017 and registered the logo in 2019. The trademark website says the logo was registered for "online social networking services", "social networking services in the fields of entertainment, gaming, and application development" etc
Lawyer Ed Timberlake tweeted that Microsoft also has registered an “X” logo. As per the USPTO document posted by him, the trademark was registered in connection with “online chat rooms” and “entertainment services”.
Gerben added that Meta and Microsoft would sue only if Musk’s new brand encroaches on their brand equity. Trademarks owners could claim infringement and sue for monetary damages or even block the use of the logo if Musk’s X brand causes confusion among consumers, the agency reported.
Meta, too, treaded trademark troubles when Facebook rebranded itself. Investment company Metacapital and virtual-reality firm MetaX filed lawsuits against Mark Zuckerberg’s firm over intellectual property. Meta had also settled another suit over its infinity-symbol logo.
"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," Douglas Masters, a trademark attorney at law firm Loeb & Loeb, told Reuters. "The logo does not have much distinctive about it, so the protection will be very narrow."
Musk has a long history with the letter "X” and the rebranding of Twitter is not a surprise move. His spacecraft engineering firm, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., is commonly known as SpaceX. Musk founded startup called X.com, an online financial services company, in 1999 and it later became PayPal. A tweet by Musk on Sunday read, “Not sure what subtle clues gave it way, but I like the letter X”.