You can't trademark a letter. Trademarks are extremely narrow and are only meant to apply in circumstances where one organization's symbol could be confused for another. In general I am very anti-intellectual-property, but trademarks are okay in my book. They are basically for consumer protection.
@pruwybn@storksforlegs In the future, everytime you use the letter X, even to text, you will be charged a fee of x amount of cents based on your income.
the amount of times I've read an internet article about this topic only to be met with a shockingly trivial mistake present front and center is staggering. the differences between patent, trademark, wordmark, etc. are all easily googleable and yet pretty much every article I've read on this has been using them interchangeably.
incoming rhetorical question: are these editors orangutans? (before anybody answers, i know editors & authors want to be the first one out the door so they get the most clicks and all that, but it's really not hard to make sure you're at least using the correct word. It seriously took me 20 seconds to find an answer on the difference between patent and trademark)
Of course they made the trivial mistake, because they also made a much, much bigger one. The X trademark as it pertains to social media is owned by Meta, who bought it from Microsoft when they acquired Mixer (which later became Facebook Gaming), including Mixer's X logo.
I think a lot of the issue is the widespread use of the term Intellectual Property which, arguably deliberately, conflates a few completely distinct legal concepts under one umbrella.
I can understand a company like Google (Alphabet) and Facebook (Meta) re-branding their wider business infrastructure.
Twitter is just Twitter.
X is just nostalgia, and Musk is being totally irresponsible with these announcments. He is a petulant little child, looking for attention and the likes. Damn childish - his entire Twitter venture.
for: providing on-line chat rooms for transmission of messages among computer users concerning video and computer games; providing on-line electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users concerning video and computer games, in class 38
for: entertainment services, namely, providing interactive multiplayer game services for games played over computer networks and global communications networks; providing computer games and video games downloadable over computer global communications networks; providing information on the video game and computer game industries via the internet; and providing information on computer games, video games, video game consoles and accessories therefor via the internet, in class 41
in short: basically what they did in the ensuing years with Xbox and Games for Windows - Live
Twitter's got so little money that they can't even pay all their bills, lol.
Honestly I think they rolled out the new branding without finishing it because they can't afford proper designers or project managers. The site still says "Twitter" all over the place and they can't even trademark the new logo.
Actually iOS, not iPhone. I think if it were iPhone itself, an actually marketed product from either Apple or Cisco, it would have ended a bit differently. But in both cases, it was just iOS, the operating system of the marketed products.
In both cases, iOS was a selling point of the product, but not the product itself.
Maybe he shoulda just stuck with the bird, or thought of a name that is even a tad more creative. I'm pretty sure a hamster or a piece of paper could do a better job at managing Twitter than Muskrat is right now.
That’s… not how that works.
The brand isn’t "x.com" either, it’s "X". They don’t even use x.com as a domain.
Even if it was x.com, a video game being called Xcom wouldn’t be close enough to the website x.com to be able to be confused. It would be different if they both were websites.