The strategy of renaming Twitter as X could be costly for Elon Musk, as there are many companies around the world that have registered trademarks with the letter X, the new name given by the tycoon to the social network last Monday. It's not just small companies, companies of the caliber of Meta and Microsoft have registered X patents and that could have consequences for the platform owner who could soon be facing more than one lawsuit.
In fact, intellectual property lawyer Josh Gerben told Reuters, the question is not whether litigation will occur, but when. More so when you consider that there are about 900 U.S. companies with the patent on file: "There's a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody," he explained.
It is true that the least likely plaintiffs are precisely the big tech companies since they have registered the letter, but it is quite different from the model currently used by the company owned by Musk. In Microsoft's case, the letter appears as part of the Xbox communications system and does not pose too many problems for the social network. Meta, its big competitor, has also had the letter X patented since 2019 but in its case in a white and blue version of the letter used in the software and social networking fields.
Patent the design instead of the "X"?
However, even if the two giants do not sue Musk, it does not mean that this cannot happen with the other companies, since patenting a single letter is practically impossible. That's why, Loeb & Loeb law firm trademark attorney Douglas Masters detailed, the social network is more likely to pursue another strategy to protect its new 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.
However, the logo design itself would not solve the problem either because, as Masters points out, it has no distinguishing features: "The logo does not have much distinctive about it, so the protection will be very narrow."
Something that the previous logo, the Larry bird, did have. Despite its many modifications over the years, the Twitter logo and name were already recognized and virtually all of society associated it with the social network. In addition, Gerben told Business Insider, patenting something acquires more value and, therefore, protection as it is used. For this reason, he said, he does not consider such a radical change of logo to be a good idea:
My first thought is how much value is probably tied into the Twitter brand, and the bird logo, that has been cast aside. Because it's exceptionally rare that any brand becomes so pervasive in culture and quite frankly, around the world, as Twitter has become.
Twitter logo evolution 2006–2023#WebDesignHistory pic.twitter.com/oH28pL6Fqi
— Web Design Museum (@WebDesignMuseum) July 24, 2023
