Elon Musk’s Twitter rebrand could land him in legal hot water with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others, experts say.
On Sunday, Musk announced that he did get rid of the Twitter brand and logo. The social media platform is now known as “X,” CEO Linda Yaccarino confirmed Sunday.
“X is the future state of limitless interactivity – focused on audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities,” Yaccarino, 59, posted in the application. “Powered [artificial intelligence]X will bring us all together in ways we are only beginning to imagine.”
The problem: Meta, Microsoft and other companies already own trademarks for Twitter’s new name.
Meta’s trademark for the white-and-blue X, it refers to “social networking services in the fields of entertainment, gaming and application development.” Microsoft’s trademark refers to Xbox gaming consoles. A legal battle over the intellectual property rights to X may be inevitable.
“There’s a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this,” said trademark attorney Josh Gerben. he told Reuters on Tuesday after reportedly discovering nearly 900 active trademark registrations in the U.S. already covering the letter X.
In that scenario, Musk’s chances of winning are relatively high, says Stacy Wu, an intellectual property attorney based in New York.
“Given Musk’s high profile and deep pockets, I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets sued by relatively smaller companies looking for good PR or a payoff based on the likelihood of confusion,” she told CNBC Make It. “But they are unlikely to win in the end.
Wu offers two reasons. First, Musk may be able to get “limited exclusive rights” to the specific X used in the company’s new black-and-white logo, he says.
This can have its own complications. Despite the fact that it is offered “for free” to the user, the logo appears to have been derived from a named font set Special alphabets 4 which requires a one-time license payment of $29.99. It is unclear whether Musk or the designer obtained the proper license before publishing the logo.
The company did not immediately respond to CNBC Make It’s request for comment.
Second, Musk’s ability to outbid potential suitors financially gives him a strong chance against most challengers. “Trademark cases often settle when one side doesn’t want to spend more money fighting,” says Wu.
Legal questions aside, Twitter’s move to X ushers in a new era for the platform to become “all apps”, which, according to Musk, offers an abundance of services in one place. His publicly described vision bears some resemblance to WeChat, the instant messaging, social media and payments app popular in China, owned by tech giant Tencent.
“This transformation has absolutely no limits,” Yaccarino wrote on Sunday. “X will be a platform that can deliver, well… everything. @elonmusk and I look forward to working with our teams and each of our partners to bring X to the world.”
The announcement comes just weeks after the launch of Threads, a Meta-owned app that some consider a “Twitter clone.” It also follows a meeting last week between President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and representatives of several major tech companies to discuss AI security measures.
Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google, Open AI, Inflection and Anthropic have all “agreed to voluntary commitments to responsible innovation,” Biden announced in a statement.
“These commitments are a promising step, but we have a lot more work to do together,” Biden said. “Realizing the promise of AI through risk management will require some new laws, regulations and oversight.”
X may be “powered by AI” in the future, as Yaccarino noted, but the first phase of Twitter’s rebrand is simple for now. The platform’s homepage can be accessed through the X.com domain, and some desktop users may see a new logo on their screens instead of Twitter’s classic blue bird logo.
“And soon we will say goodbye to the Twitter brand and gradually to all the birds,” Musk wrote on Sunday.
More complex changes could come later, Yaccarino said.
“It’s an exceptionally rare thing — in life and in business — that you get a second chance to make another big impression,” she wrote. “Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now X will go further and transform the global square.”
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