Divya Prata, Pune
Elon Musk’s intention to redesign Twitter as X may be legally complicated: firms such as Meta and Microsoft already hold intellectual property rights to the same letter.
X is so frequently used and mentioned in trademarks that it is ripe for legal challenges – and the firm previously known as Twitter may have its own troubles in the future protecting its X brand.
“There’s a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody,” said trademark expert Josh Gerben, according to whom there are almost 900 current US trademark registrations that already cover the letter X in a variety of businesses.
On Monday, Musk rebranded the social media network Twitter to X and introduced a new logo for the platform, a stylised black-and-white rendition of the letter.
Owners of trademarks, which protect things like brand names, logos, and slogans that identify the source of goods, can file infringement claims if alternative branding causes customer confusion. The remedies vary from monetary damages to the prohibition of usage.
Microsoft has controlled the X trademark for communications regarding their Xbox video game system since 2003. Meta Platforms, whose Threads platform is a new Twitter competitor, has a federal trademark covering a blue-and-white letter “X” for industries such as software and social media that was registered in 2019.
According to Gerben, Meta, and Microsoft are unlikely to litigate unless they feel scared that Twitter’s X infringes on the brand equity they developed in the letter.
When Meta changed its name from Facebook, it faced intellectual property difficulties. Last year, investment firm Metacapital and virtual-reality business MetaX brought trademark cases against it, and it resolved another over its new infinity-symbol logo. And even if Musk is successful in altering the moniker, others may still claim ‘X’ for themselves.
“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,” said Douglas Masters, a trademark attorney at law firm Loeb & Loeb. “The logo does not have much distinctive about it, so the protection will be very narrow.”
Insiders previously revealed that Meta possessed an X trademark, and lawyer Ed Timberlake tweeted that Microsoft also had one.
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