Elon Musk's decision to redesign Twitter as X may be legally tricky, considering companies like as Meta and Microsoft already hold intellectual property rights to the same letter!
X is so widely used and mentioned in trademarks that it is ripe for legal challenges - and the firm formerly known as Twitter may face its own troubles in the future protecting its X brand.
"There's a 100% chance that Twitter will be sued over this," said trademark attorney Josh Gerben, who noted that almost 900 existing U.S. trademark registrations already cover the letter X in a variety of businesses.
On Monday, Musk rebranded the social media network Twitter to X and introduced a new logo for the platform, a stylized black-and-white version of the letter.
Owners of trademarks, which protect things like brand names, logos, and slogans that identify the source of goods, can file infringement claims if alternative branding causes customer confusion. The remedies vary from monetary damages to the prohibition of use.
Microsoft has controlled the X trademark for communications regarding their Xbox video-game system since 2003. Meta Platforms, whose Threads platform is a new Twitter competitor, has a federal trademark covering a blue-and-white letter "X" for industries such as software and social media that was registered in 2019.
According to Gerben, Meta and Microsoft are unlikely to litigate unless they feel scared that Twitter's X infringes on the brand equity they developed in the letter.
Requests for comment were not returned by the three companies.
When Meta changed its name from Facebook, it faced intellectual property difficulties. Last year, investment firm Metacapital and virtual-reality business MetaX brought trademark cases against it, and it resolved another over its new infinity-symbol logo.
And even if Musk is successful in changing the moniker, others may still claim 'X' for themselves.
"Given the difficulty of protecting a single letter, particularly one as popular commercially as 'X,' Twitter's protection is likely to be limited to very similar graphics to their X logo," said Douglas Masters, a trademark attorney at Loeb & Loeb.
"Because the logo isn't particularly distinctive, the protection will be limited."
Insider previously revealed that Meta possessed an X trademark, and lawyer Ed Timberlake tweeted that Microsoft also had one.
