Why Twitter’s rebrand to X could possibly be legally difficult

Twitter proprietor Elon Musk’s marketing campaign to rebrand the bird-themed social media platform to X is effectively underway — however trademarking the brand new model and defending it from authorized challenges could also be a bumpier course of.

The letter X is often cited in emblems, that means it’s attainable the web site previously often called Twitter could possibly be accused of infringing upon one other firm’s mental property, trademark lawyer Josh Gerben informed Reuters. 

“There is a 100% probability that Twitter goes to get sued over this by any person,” Gerben stated. 

Almost 900 firms have filed trademark registrations involving the letter X within the U.S. alone, together with tech behemoths Meta and Microsoft, he informed the publication.

Registering a trademark permits an organization to stop third events from “advertising and marketing an identical or related services or products beneath an an identical or confusingly related” title, according to the World Mental Property Group. An organization that infringes on a trademark could face fines or be blocked from additional use of the infringing articles, america Patent and Trademark website exhibits. 

Musk rechristened Twitter as X over the weekend, an obvious throwback to his work on web site X.com, which finally turned PayPal. The brand new emblem, which was crowdsourced, is a black and white model of the letter X rendered in an artwork deco type, Musk stated in a tweet on Sunday.

“And shortly we will bid adieu to the twitter model and, steadily, all of the birds,” Musk stated in one other tweet that very same day. 

The simplicity of the brand, nevertheless, could make the microblog’s model harder to guard, Douglas Masters, a trademark lawyer at regulation agency Loeb & Loeb, informed Reuters. 

“The emblem doesn’t have a lot [that is] distinctive about it, so the safety can be very slender,” Masters stated. “Given the problem in defending a single letter, particularly one as in style commercially as ‘X’, Twitter’s safety is more likely to be confined to very related graphics to their X emblem.”

Insider noted that the brand new X emblem additionally resembles a generic Unicode character and has been utilized in mathematical textbooks because the Seventies.

Twitter customers have additionally criticized the web site’s rebranding, drawing comparisons between its new emblem and that of a number of grownup movie web sites. 

The rebrand comes as Twitter struggles with declining consumer site visitors, a lack of half of its top advertisers and worker attrition. The web site is saddled with roughly $13 billion value of debt it took on throughout its acquisition by Musk, which was finalized in October 2022.