“Tweet” and the bird logo apparently enter the public domain

Rygian

Decision from the judge "Issuance of the injunction precluding Bluebird's use of the Twitter-formative marks is contingent on X Corp.'s posting of a $500,000 bond." Both X Corp. and Bluebird have asked to go to court on Nov 2027.

blfr

The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name. So the trademark should hold for as long as a reasonable person can be confused by the new Twitter regardless of people's dislike towards Elon. I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.

MatthewWilkes

Is it accurate to describe this as the public domain? I would expect that the bird logo still enjoys copyright protection, independent from its status as a trademark.

weinzierl

Probably not many do remember, but before this logo Twitter had a different bird logo until the company was already quite big. If I remember correctly this logo was allegedly bought from a royalty free image platform and Twitter had no exclusive rights to it. Also there was a little outcry that the original artist just received the royalty free platform usual ridiculously small one time payment. EDIT: The one I remember is the second one in the timeline image from the following (unfortunately ad infested) article, so apparently it was not the first one they had. https://www.afaqs.com/news/digital/has-musk-gone-too-far-wit...

shevy-java

A small, but nonetheless strategically important, defeat for the billionaire Elon "my right arm constantly twitches into a straight arm" musky Musk.

Animats

Trademarks are use it or lose it. OLDSMOBILE, for example, is a cancelled General Motors trademark for automobiles.[1] No cars sold, no trademark.

mrweasel

I can't figure out if renaming Twitter to X is the stupidest branding decision I've ever encountered or if it's bloody brilliant. Every time Danish media talks about X, they say "The social media X". So X in itself is completely unrecognizable, you actively have to mention that you're talking about the social media platform. That's is however also rather genius, because now the connection between X and "social media" is strengthened every time it's mentioned.

HelloUsername

Related: " Twitter Is Back at Twitter.now " 26.aug.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49455791 19 comments " New Twitter rebrands to Tweet.app after court's double-edged ruling " 06.sep.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49581979 " Twitter " 10.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223543 11 comments " Former Twitter Attorney Files for 'Twitter' Trademark " 09.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208672 13 comments " US startup seeks to reclaim Twitter trademarks 'abandoned' by Musk's X " 09.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203468

nunobrito

It always made more sense to call these tiny texts as "tweets" rather than "toots" (mastodon) or "status update" (generic) so it would be good having the right to use that term as public domain. There have been worse names for this kind of updates in the past. At some point in time was common to "finger" someone online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)

amazingamazing

I remember when there was a big wave towards bluesky, mastodon and threads. Here we are, every day twitter/x is on the front page.

ryan_glass

This reminds me of a certain Southpark episode...

thih9

Looks like there is now a tweet.new (not the same as twitter.com ) run by Project Bluebird (not the same as Bluesky). Very confusing. The "Trust Dial" seems a new concept to be fair. Then again, it's just a concept and possibly AI generated like the rest of the page. I wonder what trust score would the website assign to itself at that point.

ck2

Bluesky could do the funniest April Fools

not-so-darkstar

When did twitter became the place where presidents share news? What did they do before it?

TheRealPomax

Surely by literally saying "formerly Twitter", this is an admission of non-use, thus invalidating the trademark on the term as it is not just "not used for anything" but is explicitly being distanced from by X in writing.

pwdisswordfishq

A lapsed trademark can still be under copyright, right?

eddof13

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_U5a097HPU - norm

skiing_crawling

the "new" Twitter basically looks like a cash/name grab, I was disappointed to see that nobody involved in it was affiliated the Twitter, and it's mostly run by non-technical/lawyer types.