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A Virginia startup calling itself Operation Bluebird announced this week that it has filed a formal petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office, asking the federal agency to cancel X Corporation\u2019s trademarks of the words \u201cTwitter\u201d and \u201ctweet\u201d since X has allegedly abandoned them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe TWITTER and TWEET brands have been eradicated from X Corp.\u2019s products, services, and marketing, effectively abandoning the storied brand, with no intention to resume use of the mark,\u201d the petition states. \u201cThe TWITTER bird was grounded.\u201d<\/p>\n
If successful, two leaders of the group tell Ars, Operation Bluebird would launch a social network under the name Twitter.new, possibly as early as late next year. (Twitter.new has created a working prototype and is already inviting users to reserve handles.)<\/p>\n
Neither X Corporation nor its owner Elon Musk immediately responded to Ars Technica\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n
Michael Peroff, an Illinois attorney and founder of Operation Bluebird, said that in the intervening years, more Twitter-like social media networks have sprung up or gained traction\u2014like Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. But none have the scale or brand recognition that Twitter did prior to Musk\u2019s takeover.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere certainly are alternatives,\u201d Peroff said. \u201cI don\u2019t know that any of them at this point in time are at the scale that would make a difference in the national conversation, whereas a new Twitter really could.\u201d<\/p>\n
Similarly, Peroff\u2019s business partner, Stephen Coates, an attorney who formerly served as Twitter\u2019s general counsel, said that Operation Bluebird aims to re-create some of the magic that Twitter once had.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember some time ago, I\u2019ve had celebrities react to my content on Twitter during the Super Bowl or events,\u201d he told Ars. \u201cAnd we want that experience to come back, that whole town square, where we are all meshed in there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion. He eventually changed the company name and brand identity from Twitter to X. That decision, Operation Bluebird says, created an opening for the Twitter name to be formally abandoned.<\/p>\n
In July 2023, Musk himself tweeted that \u201cwe shall bid adieu to the twitter brand, and gradually, all the birds.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was when Peroff, a Chicago-area attorney specializing in trademark and IP law, saw an opportunity not only to claim the name Twitter but also to use the iconic illustrated logo that was affectionately referred to internally as \u201cLarry Bird.\u201d<\/p>\n
Peroff and others began formally organizing Operation Bluebird, a way to bring back Twitter in name, services, and format, catering in particular to commercial brands.<\/p>\n
Some corporations have been reluctant to advertise on X for fear that they will be associated with unsavory content, such as extremist views, scam-like posts, or pornbots. In September 2024, market research firm Kantar put out a study noting that 26 percent of surveyed marketers planned to abandon their ad campaigns on X.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe think our moderation tools will help the discussion evolve into something more responsible,\u201d Peroff said. \u201cBrands are stuck on X because they have no other place to go.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Threads, which is owned by Meta, began testing ads earlier this year, only recently did it reach the scale\u2014around 400 million monthly active users\u2014that Twitter had at the time of its acquisition by Musk. Neither Mastodon nor Bluesky have any advertising for the time being.<\/p>\n
Mark Lemley, a Stanford Law professor and expert in trademark law, told Ars that X might be able to defend the Twitter marks if it can show that it is still using them.<\/p>\n
\u201cMere \u2018token use\u2019 won\u2019t be enough to reserve the mark,\u201d Lemley wrote in an email. \u201cOr [X] could defend if it can show that it plans to go back to using Twitter. Consumers obviously still know the brand name. It seems weird to think someone else could grab the name when consumers still associate it with the ex-social media site of that name. But that\u2019s what the law says.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mark Jaffe, an intellectual property attorney in California who is not involved in the case, thinks that X Corporation may have a battle to keep the Twitter marks.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce it\u2019s no longer prominent on the website and the owner, the CEO, says it\u2019s now called this and not that,\u201d he told Ars, \u201cI don\u2019t know how you beat an abandonment argument.\u201d<\/p>\n
This story originally appeared on<\/em> Ars Technica.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story A Virginia startup calling itself Operation Bluebird announced this week that it has filed a formal petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office, asking the federal agency to cancel X Corporation\u2019s trademarks of the words \u201cTwitter\u201d and \u201ctweet\u201d since X has allegedly abandoned them. \u201cThe TWITTER and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40569,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-40568","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40568\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}