important for anybody following this topic to also know that “hundreds of trademarks” can sometimes just mean that there’s a few trademarks in each class. Trademarks in the US are divided into classes, so that two companies that do different things can still be named the same or similar.
The article still has a point, in that similar software companies like Meta and Microsoft have trademarks for “X,” but if your PVC pipe company is called X, you might not have a good case against Twitter because who is getting confused between PVC pipes and social media?
“Your honor, let the record state that there is a common saying to the effect that “the internet is a series of tubes”. Now, PVC pipes are also a variety of tube. Therefore…”
Apple tries to trademark their apple logo, not the bitten one a full apple in my country…
So is it okay for me to call my mastodon server twitter now?
Apple stopped giving their new products the"i" prefix because they weren’t able to trademark it because “you can’t trademark a letter.”
I doubt that they’ll allow Elon Musk to trademark the letter “x”
You can’t trademark a letter and you can’t copyright a font - I believe the courts have ruled so due to first amendment concerns.
I think you can, however, trademark a logo that consists of a letter. I’m thinking specifically of the McDonald’s M logo. I might be wrong, but I have seen Coming to America multiple times.
The problem here will be that Elon’s new X logo is really just an existing Unicode character: 𝕏. It’s appeared in maths papers for decades. This isn’t like the golden arches - there’s nothing novel there to trademark.
Those are all the credentials we need Doctor 👍
That might be copyright though? The McD M.
oh, look, musk made yet another stupid, impulsive decision that could have disastrous, short- and long-term consequences for
twitterer… “x”Pretty sure Sesame Street’s use of the letter X pre-dates Musk’s claim to it as well.
