Elon May Have a Huge Issue Because Microsoft Owns the “X” Trademark
There's another big problem with Elon Musk's Twitter rebrand: Microsoft owns the trademark to the title "X." In a word: lol.
As amusing as it is to see Elon fail, letters like "X" shoud not be trademarkable. Just one indicator that we're truly reaching capitalist extremism levels of insanity.
Also, how the hell could Microsoft get a patent for X in 2003 when X has been around since 1984, and is pretty much a direct competitor? This makes no sense at all.
Trademarks can apply to different areas. In this case, Microsoft's trademark is for services related to online chat and gaming, not for something like a window manager.
How is Xorg a "direct competitor" to Microsoft? Especially Microsoft's trademark to X in the gaming market where they own the Xbox and Xorg doesn't participate at all?
Trademarks protect consumers by preventing fraud and misleading naming. It makes perfect sense that Microsoft owns X in the given market space due to the enormous prevalence of Xbox. Their first console was literally X-shaped and it would be bad for consumers for anyone to be able to make the "X-station" or "X-cube" or some such.
"You better not touch the F word! Call of Duty did it first!"
Welp. I can see it happening.
Trademarks only cover very significant uses. Microsoft can (and apparently did) trademark X in connection to the Xbox, so competitors can't make a game console called an XStation or PlayStation X, but people not making video game consoles aren't affected.
[Edit: Man, Lemmy is weird. I deleted this comment right after posting it because I thought it was redundant. I only undeleted it because I saw it was the top-rated comment in its sub-thread.]
You can also protect colors. Like there is a defined "target red" and "home depot orange" (probably a twitter blue that I guess will be up for grabs soon). You could use that orange to open, say, a day-care, hair salon, or auto-shop, but not a hardware store. Basically if you can show it would cause consumer confusion you can protect it.
Trademarks are a government-enforced (i.e. publicly-mandated) monopoly, which is fundamentally antithetical to capitalism.
Capitalism: "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit."
For sure, there are many shades of grey to be had here, and the world has 0 purely capitalist societies (in fact, such a society is inherently impossible). But every time the public controls trade and industry, e.g. when enforcing trademark law, that isn't capitalism.
Private property laws are a government-enforced (i.e. publicly-mandated) style of ownership.
Fure sure, there are many shades of grey to be had here, but Elon Musk owning Twitter is the ultimate form of communism.
“You can’t own letters, man” -Elon, probably
“But I own the website! That’s no fair!”
It's not the letter x it's a Unicode symbol that looks like the letter x.
Xehanort literally malding right now
He already lost that fight to Mercedes for the letter E.
"I can, but that's because I'm not a penniless hippie." Also Elon, probably
i thought it was google tryin to copyright the alphabet
Pretty sure Google owns that.
I’m glad we’re currently on a good news streak. Those climate change articles were weighing on me.
Agreed lol
How does both meta and microsoft own the rights to "X"
Trademarks are very narrow. From my quick search Microsoft has 'X' marks in relation to Excel and Xbox.
Meta's trademarks actually has the class, 'Online social networking services,' that will overlap with Twitter's new name.
From what I understand, MS owns it in regards gaming, and Meta owns it in regards to social media.
Probably in different industries. I saw the MS patent is for game related stuff. I would assume metas is for social media stuff, or some other field they're involved in.
Trademark, not patent. I wouldn't normally correct you but there seems to be a whole lot of misunderstanding in this thread about the categories of intellectual property.
I was just about to ask that myself.
I thought it was nigh impossible to trademark a letter?
I saw a tweet from the founder of xe.com who literally used the same logo in the 90s and he discussed the challenges in globally trademarking a single letter.
Both aspects were giant cans of worms for El Musky.
I love it when they fight
Maybe he wants to create a real life MegaMan X
What about the Malcolm X Estate, do they have a say in this?
The design is also a unicode character.
Sort of. It's how some fonts render that character. I've noticed it tends to look like the Twitter logo with Android's default font, but it's noticeably different in Firefox on Windows.
I want Musk to lose but I hate the idea of a single letter being copyright.
Trademark, not copyright. It means that you can't make something and call it "X" if there's any chance that your "X" and their "X" might get mixed up. Google ran into this same problem when they created "Alphabet" - it was already a trademark of some German car manufacturer (probably Audi or BMW), but the court ruled that "Alphabet the car company" and "Alphabet the online services company" are far enough apart that the average user probably won't confuse one for the other (although the Dove soap and Dove chocolate makes me doubt it). Twitter and Microsoft both offer online services. It might be enough of an overlap to constitute a trademark violation.
Oh damn, is that why chocolates have been tasting so weird lately? Ig I've been eating soap!
Copyright and trademarks are different things. In this case it looks like it applies mainly to the Xbox "X" logo like is seen on this (hilarious) page of the filing and is only for things related to messaging and gaming, so it's not as broad as it sounds. Based on a cursory look at Google results from before July 1st, I can't find any examples of Microsoft actually suing anyone for using the letter X, either.
Love your username!!!
So does that make Elon Musk an X-Offender?
Why does his face remind me of the Phantom of the Opera? Maybe there will be an unfortunate chandelier falling incident.
One of the best damn openings ever.
The X-box. X.org, the X files... and now, simply... X.
Folks really love the X letter for some reason.
Professor Utonium is also gonna sue Elon for the Element X trademark
At this point it wouldn't surprise me if Musk decided on X because he thinks he's the incarnation of Malcolm.
smdh
Yeah definitely don’t need to check that out beforehand
🤣
I’m just here for his ass getting handed to him
Hard to tell if he's winning or losing. If he's being incentivized to destroy the integrity of a mainstream information-sharing platform, he's done well. If he in any way wanted to run the company, he's done laughably bad. I guess time will tell
Phoney Stark's gonna get into a lot of hot water over that.
I thought you couldn't take a trademark that already exists. At least in my country when I applied my trademark I had to use a portal to check it didn't exist and the service writes that they check too. Not sure about that but at least it's supposed to be checked and blocked if already taken.
So after all these years, we finally found X
Pretty sure X has existed since Ancient Greece at least. Maybe even the Phoenicians before the Greek alphabet?
I'm puzzled by his stupidit.
I meannnn I don’t “hate” Musk, but boy…. Is he an idiot who deserves all the shit that he gets. My 7yr old is probably smarter than him atm.
For as much as the reddit/Lemmy communities claim to hate Elon they talk about him constantly.
Elon 2028
Hard to not talk about a train wreck.
Especially if the train somehow managed to dismantle tracks that is going to run on.
You do realize he was born in South Africa so is therefore ineligible to hold the office of President right?
News sites talk about news. That includes things that people don't like.
It's kind of like saying:
-Those guys on reddit sure do talk about Walmart taking advantage of their workers even though they hate capitalism
-Climate activists talk about climate change a lot, I thought they hated it?
-Why does fox news spend so much time hating on democrats? Don't they know that they aren't supposed to talk about stuff they disagree with?
Elon doesn't have to be liked to be relevant.
We used to get this bullshit all the time on r/atheism on Reddit. "You guys sure talk about religion/God a lot for atheists." What the fuck else are a bunch of atheists getting together going to talk about, baseball?
