There's another big problem with Elon Musk's Twitter rebrand: Microsoft owns the trademark to the title "X." In a word: lol.
  • Octagon9561@lemmy.ml
    142·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • sab@kbin.social
      473·
      1 year ago

      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.

        • sab@kbin.social
          251·
          1 year ago

          Makes sense I guess. Somehow also makes the trademark even more absurd.

          Reminds me a little of Apple v. Apple Records, and how Apple promised never too use their brand to enter into the music industry (like they later did with iTunes anyway).

          • FlowVoid@midwest.social
            31·
            1 year ago

            In 1991, Apple Computer made an agreement to pay Apple Records $26 million in exchange for letting Apple Computer use the “Apple” trademark for music. But that was long before iTunes, they wanted the Apple trademark for their computer chimes. Apple Records agreed to let Apple Computer use the Apple trademark for music as long as it did not “package, sell or distribute physical music materials.”

            Much later, iTunes was developed and Apple Records sued Apple Computer. Eventually a judge sided with Apple Computer, pointing out that iTunes did not package, sell or distribute physical music materials. Thus, Apple Records couldn’t get another bite of that Apple…

      • fiat_lux@kbin.social
        22·
        1 year ago

        The law is a weapon of the rich. You don’t have to be right, you just have to be able to afford out-lawyering your competition. Patents are especially revolting.

        • sab@kbin.social
          4·
          1 year ago

          Of course, my question was rhetorical. I guess it didn’t come out so clearly considering it’s also, at least in theory, a damned good question.

          • fiat_lux@kbin.social
            3·
            1 year ago

            It was probably clear enough, you just caught me half-asleep and unmedicated. I really dislike patents.

      • ThoughtGoblin@lemm.ee
        14·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • sab@kbin.social
          3·
          1 year ago

          One could not imagine Linux without X11 in 2003. And in 2003, the situation between Microsoft and Linux was rather tense.

          That said, I managed to somehow forget about Xbox. I agree it makes sense that Sony couldn’t launch an “X console” with a gigantic X on the side.

          So yes, I want thinking it through. I do however think that using this trademark against X.xom would be ill conceived, no matter how much I hate Musk. If they start moving into gaming it might be different though, so fair enough.

          Thanks for making me think it through more! :)

      • GustavoM@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        “You better not touch the F word! Call of Duty did it first!”

        Welp. I can see it happening.

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
      14·
      1 year ago

      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.]

      • batmaniam@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • quindraco@lemmy.world
      57·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Fibby@sh.itjust.works
        71·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • fubo@lemmy.world
    763·
    1 year ago

    Aside from Microsoft and apparently Facebook, there’s also X the classic Unix display protocol, aka X11.

    • monsterpiece42@reddthat.com
      6·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
        12·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • fearout@kbin.social
    21·
    1 year ago

    I’m glad we’re currently on a good news streak. Those climate change articles were weighing on me.

  • Borkingheck@lemmy.world
    19·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • rtxn@lemmy.world
      22·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • nefarious@kbin.social
      7·
      1 year ago

      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.