Former Twitter Attorney Files for 'Twitter' Trademark | Hacker News Reader

Former Twitter Attorney Files for 'Twitter' Trademark

gerbenlaw.com

47 pointsedent13 comments

> The only remaining use is that Twitter.com now forwards to X.com, which by itself is generally not enough to constitute ongoing trademark use.

I wonder if X's lawyers can argue that the millions of Twitter-branded share buttons and links all over the internet count.

Or all the people who still call it Twitter as an ineffectual act of protest.

I hope people aren't reading it as silly protesting when I say "Twitter" or "tweet," I just think it sounds way better.

I hope people aren't reading it as silly protesting just because I'm getting old (37) and have 15+ years of neural pathways of daily use of the site to nuke. "tweeted" -> "posted on X.com" is really hard.

I think it's: "tweeted" -> "xited" pronounced "shitted"

Not a trademark lawyer, but I wonder if that can actually result in implications of genericization.

It's not genericization in this case, people only call X "Twitter," not all text-based short form social media.

I hear people on Mastodon, who undoubtedly came from X, talk about 'tweeting a Mastodon post' instead of posting or 'tooting'.

There's no way this will actually be allowed. Musk is petty, has deep pockets, and giving up the trademark also means losing Twitter.com and all the links to it. This filing must be a publicity stunt.

For what it is worth, they have communicated that they do eventually plan to retire the domain themselves [1]:

>Re-enrolling your security key will associate them with x[.]com, allowing us to retire the Twitter domain.

[1] https://xcancel.com/Safety/status/1982278858457174522

Musk has spent plenty of money on whims, perceived insult or for the LOLs before. If he doesn't like this, he could easily spend some cash to "use" the twitter marks for the smallest possible value of "use" that meets the legal standard.

They famously lost the trademark to "Talkboy" and someone snagged it up recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talkboy

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