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 made the experiment some times ago: it's faster to edit the link, replace x.com with nitter.net and load the content from there, than wait until the original page load. The time difference isn't meaningful (it's less than a second), but the fact that a website loses against a manual redirection to another front end is still a spectacular proof of incompetence.
I wonder if it is by design. On Nitter, which is fast-loading and streamlined, it is trivial to ctrl-click on a bunch of commenter accounts and readily see they are bots (photo from This Person Does Not Exist, unrealistically single-issue posting, etc.). On X where things move slow as treacle, it is harder for the average person to figure that out.
Same here. There is always the "log in" nagging pop-up. But I will never log in again to the right-arm-gesture guy, so this is just time wasted for me.
We could need some decentralized way to share "tweets" though. Not linked to greedy billionaires.
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.
Musk probably came across the shape as a child and drew it on a napkin to carry it with him, like he did with the Cybertruck design after "beating" Car Designer on either the Apple II or PC
> 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.
And similarly, when an outcry is worthless, it's valuable to tell the people involved that they should shut up. Outcries don't have to be entertained and they also don't have to be tolerated.
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...
The "phone" is probably landline or old 2G phone, iphone is internet connected smartphone (extra whatsapp etc).
I remember having troubles voice calling iphone users, because of some roaming data bs, their device would not correctly fallback to 2g voice call on bad 4g connection, it tried to use data everywhere (voice call would just get ignored).
Plus imessage does not correctly use sms protocol, instead tries to use internet and apples bs extensions. With bad connectivity it means sms will not reliably work on iphones!
Super relevant in germany and their shitty 4g networks!!!
Heeey, our mobile networks are much less shitty than our railway services! :)
Anyways, in such cases, I would try to get more competent hardware, instead of proudly advertize it in my email signature. Also, yeah, she was as competent as our mobile networks or our railway. When I subscribed the contract, she was making fun of another tenant who failed transferring money and then came with lame excuses like 'the bank account number was invalid'. In a very unfriendly German rich grandma way of making fun. Turned out when I tried to transfer the first rent: The bank account number was invalid... Well... At least she was precise with the mobile phone she had (not so much with its spelling, though). :)
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.
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.
I made the experiment some times ago: it's faster to edit the link, replace x.com with nitter.net and load the content from there, than wait until the original page load. The time difference isn't meaningful (it's less than a second), but the fact that a website loses against a manual redirection to another front end is still a spectacular proof of incompetence.
I wonder if it is by design. On Nitter, which is fast-loading and streamlined, it is trivial to ctrl-click on a bunch of commenter accounts and readily see they are bots (photo from This Person Does Not Exist, unrealistically single-issue posting, etc.). On X where things move slow as treacle, it is harder for the average person to figure that out.
Same here. There is always the "log in" nagging pop-up. But I will never log in again to the right-arm-gesture guy, so this is just time wasted for me.
We could need some decentralized way to share "tweets" though. Not linked to greedy billionaires.
fb and insta have the same annoying login screens too. seems like most of the web does these days.
If you want to share tweets from X, there is exactly that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283
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
He took it from a tweet https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1683310992493608960
Wasn't it basically the X11 window system logo?
It's confusingly similar (by the "average person" metric( but I don't think it's identical
$ \mathbb{X} $
I don't think he'd be able to come up with this.
Musk probably came across the shape as a child and drew it on a napkin to carry it with him, like he did with the Cybertruck design after "beating" Car Designer on either the Apple II or PC
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.
And similarly, when an outcry is worthless, it's valuable to tell the people involved that they should shut up. Outcries don't have to be entertained and they also don't have to be tolerated.
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=49455791 19 comments
"New Twitter rebrands to Tweet.app after court's double-edged ruling" 06.sep.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49581979
"Twitter" 10.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223543 11 comments
"Former Twitter Attorney Files for 'Twitter' Trademark" 09.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208672 13 comments
"US startup seeks to reclaim Twitter trademarks 'abandoned' by Musk's X" 09.dec.2025 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.
In what way? I haven’t seen someone say “toot” in a very long time. Tweet I did but that was arguably more entrenched in pop culture over the years.
I guess it depends on what community/bubble are you in. Many fediverse users I know have always been, and will always be tooting.
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?
Okay, what other catchy term instead of "president" would you suggest?
King?
Pedophile?
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...
The "phone" is probably landline or old 2G phone, iphone is internet connected smartphone (extra whatsapp etc).
I remember having troubles voice calling iphone users, because of some roaming data bs, their device would not correctly fallback to 2g voice call on bad 4g connection, it tried to use data everywhere (voice call would just get ignored).
Plus imessage does not correctly use sms protocol, instead tries to use internet and apples bs extensions. With bad connectivity it means sms will not reliably work on iphones!
Super relevant in germany and their shitty 4g networks!!!
Heeey, our mobile networks are much less shitty than our railway services! :)
Anyways, in such cases, I would try to get more competent hardware, instead of proudly advertize it in my email signature. Also, yeah, she was as competent as our mobile networks or our railway. When I subscribed the contract, she was making fun of another tenant who failed transferring money and then came with lame excuses like 'the bank account number was invalid'. In a very unfriendly German rich grandma way of making fun. Turned out when I tried to transfer the first rent: The bank account number was invalid... Well... At least she was precise with the mobile phone she had (not so much with its spelling, though). :)
The brand name version from back in the day was calling them twits.
Let tweeting ring free.
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.
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").
"The service formerly known as Twitter"...
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.