Elon Musk Might Invoke Legal Complexity By Deciding To Rebrand Twitter To X
by Sudip Roy Technology 25 July 2023
The Tesla CEO and the owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, is considering rebranding Twitter as X. However, this could complicate things for Musk as so many companies already have the same name. This could attract issues related to trademarks. Also, companies such as Meta and Microsoft already have some intellectual assets with that name.
Many companies already have trademarks on X, and it presents itself as a candidate for legal challenges. So, if Twitter were to rebrand itself to X, it might face so many legal challenges from different companies in the future.
According to U.S. Trademark attorney Josh Gerben,
“There’s a 100 per cent chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody,”
He has counted 900 such U.S. trademark registrations across different industries that use X.
However, Elon Musk rebranded Twitter on Monday and dropped a black and white logo of the letter on Monday. This can cause copyright infringement and also confuse the consumers of other brands with the same name.
Microsoft has the X trademark related to communications for their Xbox video game systems. Meta also has a federal trademark registered on the letter X in 2019. According to this trademark, they have a blue and white letter X for their social media and software fields.
Companies like Meta and Microsoft will not sue Twitter unless it threatens their brand equity built using the letter X. Meta had already faced intellectual property challenges when they changed their name from Facebook to Meta.
Also, a trademark attorney from the firm called Loeb & Loeb already said, “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, it still remains to be seen what decision Elon Musk came up with for the platform.
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