Twitter’s new “X” brand logo may face a difficult time getting trademarked as hundreds of other firms already own trademarks on the alphabet.
On Monday, Twitter started replacing its famous blue bird logo with a single, stylized letter: X. The X.com web domain now redirects users to Twitter.com. After buying Twitter in October 2022, Elon Musk changed the network’s corporate name to X Corp. However, the rebranding effort could lead to multiple challenges, according to legal experts, since many companies already own trademarks on the letter.
For instance, Microsoft has owned a trademark on X since 2003 related to its Xbox gaming systems. Facebook owner Meta Platforms has owned an X federal trademark since 2019.
During an interview with Reuters, trademark attorney Josh Gerben said that he counted almost 900 active trademark registrations in the United States alone for the X letter in multiple industries.
“There’s a 100 percent chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody,” he said.
Owners can sue those who use their trademarks by claiming infringement and also demand monetary compensation. Gerben does not expect Meta or Microsoft to sue Twitter over the X brand as long as Twitter’s X does not eat into their brand identity.
However, this doesn’t mean others will sit back. When Facebook’s name was changed to Meta, the new identity attracted multiple lawsuits from firms that had the name as part of their brand.
Harm to Twitter Brand
Some experts also raise the possibility of harm to Twitter’s brand due to the logo change. “Most of the value of twitter is in its trademarks: the word marks, logos, etc.,” Alexandra J. Roberts, a professor of law and media at Northeastern University School of Law, said in a July 24 tweet.“Plenty of consumers have negative associations with the brand, yes, but when a mark is a household name, even negative goodwill has tremendous value.”
While speaking to Reuters, Matt Rhodes, strategy lead at creative agency House 337, pointed out that “only a few brands have become verbs or seen themselves referred to in global news outlets as often as Twitter has.”
“Anything that makes it harder for people to find, or want to open the app on their cluttered phone screens, risks harming usage.”
Fernando Machado, who previously held chief marketing officer roles at Activision Blizzard, said that rebranding efforts usually take time to sink in. “Personally, I think the new approach feels a bit cold and impersonal.”
Font IP Laws
Twitter’s X logo may also be entangled in font intellectual property laws. In a July 24 tweet, Andres Guadamuz, a law and technology academic, pointed out that the new Twitter logo is using a commercial font called Special Alphabets 4 by Monotype.Fonts are protected by copyright law in the United States. As such, to use a font as a logo commercially would require the user to first purchase a license for it.
“We can’t assume anything about the licensing, the likeliest scenario for me is that this was properly licensed by a designer until someone proves otherwise. Now, can the X be trademarked? I'll let [trademark] lawyers answer that, personally I don’t think it’s distinctive enough,” Mr. Guadamuz said.
Mr. Musk has long been obsessed with the letter X. In 1999, he began a startup called X.com that later merged with another company and eventually came to be known as PayPal. He recently launched an artificial intelligence (AI) company called xAI. Mr. Musk even calls one of his sons “X.”
