Twitter’s new persona as ‘X,’ spearheaded by none other than its owner, Elon Musk marks the singular most unexpected shift since his takeover of the company in October 2022.
The rebranding from Twitter to X involves a new logo, a black and white representation of the letter X, rendered in an art deco style, which was crowdsourced. However, legal experts warn that the path to fully establishing the new brand may not be smooth sailing due to potential trademark challenges and limitations on logo protection.
“There’s a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody,” Trademark attorney, Josh Gerben, raised concerns regarding the usage of the letter X in trademarks. The letter is widely utilized across various industries, with almost 900 companies in the U.S. alone having filed trademark registrations involving the iconic symbol, including industry giants Meta, and Microsoft. This prevalence raises the possibility of other companies claiming infringement upon their intellectual property rights.
Trademark registration offers companies the ability to prevent others from using identical or confusingly similar names for similar products or services, as defined by the World Intellectual Property Organization. Infringing on a registered trademark may lead to fines and restrictions on further use of the infringing elements.
The new logo bears an uncanny resemblance to both a generic Unicode character known as the “mathematical double-struck capital X” and the lowercase “x” in the Monotype font “Special Alphabet 4.” The Unicode character has been utilized in mathematical textbooks since the 70s, serving as an abstract representation of geometric spaces or objects. Critics have also pointed out the similarities to logos used by adult film websites, drawing negative attention from some Twitter users.
Moreover, trademark attorney Douglas Masters cautioned that the logo’s simplicity might pose challenges in protecting Twitter’s brand. “Given the difficulty in protecting a single letter, especially one as commercially popular as ‘X,’ Twitter’s protection is likely to be confined to very similar graphics to their X logo,” he said. “The logo does not have much distinctive about it, so the protection will be very narrow.”
This lack of distinctive features could result in narrow protection for the company, leaving them vulnerable to potential misuse by others.
