I can understand a company like Google (Alphabet) and Facebook (Meta) re-branding their wider business infrastructure.
Twitter is just Twitter.
X is just nostalgia, and Musk is being totally irresponsible with these announcments. He is a petulant little child, looking for attention and the likes. Damn childish - his entire Twitter venture.
X.com was Musk’s site after he worked at Scotiabank. They merged with another site that had a product called Paypal that was getting some traction. Musk tried to tie the other services X.com was offering at the hip with Paypal, and if you’re old enough you probably remember a “Paypal by X.com” (or similar) branding back when you needed to buy a used 56k modem from eBay.
Musk wanted to rebrand everything to x.com, was a huge baby about it, and got pushed out as an executive and replaced by Peter Thiel. A few years ago, Musk purchased the X.com domain name from Paypal like it was a treasured childhood sled, and he’s finally found something (very stupid) to do with it.
Maybe he shoulda just stuck with the bird, or thought of a name that is even a tad more creative. I’m pretty sure a hamster or a piece of paper could do a better job at managing Twitter than Muskrat is right now.
That’s… not how that works.
The brand isn’t “x.com” either, it’s “X”. They don’t even use x.com as a domain.
Even if it was x.com, a video game being called Xcom wouldn’t be close enough to the website x.com to be able to be confused. It would be different if they both were websites.
the amount of times I’ve read an internet article about this topic only to be met with a shockingly trivial mistake present front and center is staggering. the differences between patent, trademark, wordmark, etc. are all easily googleable and yet pretty much every article I’ve read on this has been using them interchangeably.
incoming rhetorical question: are these editors orangutans? (before anybody answers, i know editors & authors want to be the first one out the door so they get the most clicks and all that, but it’s really not hard to make sure you’re at least using the correct word. It seriously took me 20 seconds to find an answer on the difference between patent and trademark)
I think a lot of the issue is the widespread use of the term Intellectual Property which, arguably deliberately, conflates a few completely distinct legal concepts under one umbrella.
It’s intentional in the sense that they all involve intangible works of the mind and are only “property” in the legal system due to developments much, much later than the “I’ll bash you with a club if take my food” or the “I’ll stab you with a spear if occupy my farm” social contracts of personal and real property. It was very useful for those learning the law.
You’re right that they do very different things in society though, and it’s not particularly helpful outside the legal profession to bundle them so tightly together. Trademarks in particular should only protect branding and identity and when not abused provide a pretty valuable direct service for consumers in that you know who you’re dealing with.
The other two protect creators and therefore indirectly promise to “encourage innovation” that should benefit everyone, but they’re literally nothing more than legalized, if limited, monopolies. As Disney has shown though, you can smear the edges of copyright and trademark until they start to blend together.
The amount of people in general that don’t understand even the most basic shit about trademarks or how they differ from copyright and often mix up the two is staggering really.
Of course they made the trivial mistake, because they also made a much, much bigger one. The X trademark as it pertains to social media is owned by Meta, who bought it from Microsoft when they acquired Mixer (which later became Facebook Gaming), including Mixer’s X logo.
You can’t trademark a letter. Trademarks are extremely narrow and are only meant to apply in circumstances where one organization’s symbol could be confused for another. In general I am very anti-intellectual-property, but trademarks are okay in my book. They are basically for consumer protection.
@pruwybn@storksforlegs In the future, everytime you use the letter X, even to text, you will be charged a fee of x amount of cents based on your income.
for: providing on-line chat rooms for transmission of messages among computer users concerning video and computer games; providing on-line electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users concerning video and computer games, in class 38
for: entertainment services, namely, providing interactive multiplayer game services for games played over computer networks and global communications networks; providing computer games and video games downloadable over computer global communications networks; providing information on the video game and computer game industries via the internet; and providing information on computer games, video games, video game consoles and accessories therefor via the internet, in class 41
in short: basically what they did in the ensuing years with Xbox and Games for Windows - Live
Actually iOS, not iPhone. I think if it were iPhone itself, an actually marketed product from either Apple or Cisco, it would have ended a bit differently. But in both cases, it was just iOS, the operating system of the marketed products.
In both cases, iOS was a selling point of the product, but not the product itself.
Apple and Cisco settled their dispute on February 20, 2007. Both companies will be allowed to use the “iPhone” name in exchange for “exploring interoperability” between Apple’s products and Cisco’s services and other unspecified terms
Seriously, they let it go for nothing. When did Apple and Cisco ever integrate products?..
Edit: Also it says they’re both allowed to use it. I would love to see Cisco come out with an “iPhone” in 2023 lol
Honestly, there would probably be far more backlash against them than benefit. But it would be hilarious.
I wonder if they got some help with early app development, or something. I’ve always avoided Cisco, so I don’t know if they offered any mobile management or monitoring tools early on.
Market capitalization means that every share of MSFT combined at the current price is worth $2.6T. The company has $100B cash on hand. That’s actual cash and investments that could be easily converted to cash. Substantially less than $2 trillion.
Musk owns stock worth billions. Stock is a liquid asset, meaning he has billions in liquid assets. The $2.6T market cap is what the public shares of MSFT are “worth.” They are owned mostly by people and orgs other than Microsoft, meaning that value is not an asset to Microsoft.
Twitter’s got so little money that they can’t even pay all their bills, lol.
Honestly I think they rolled out the new branding without finishing it because they can’t afford proper designers or project managers. The site still says “Twitter” all over the place and they can’t even trademark the new logo.
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Christ what a fucking moron. Seems to be a running theme with fascists.
I think that’s a requirement
And in #Japan, with #VisualKei #Vkei (#JapaneseRock) band #XJapan.
The frontman #Yoshiki even called out #Twitter Japan of their trademark right (which is legitimate).
I love X! (not that one) and I love reading this!
It’s fine. He just exchanged trademarks with Egosoft https://twitter.com/EGOSOFT/status/1683477783584858115 so he is in the clear 👍
I’m 99% sure that’s a joke, i can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not lmfao
It is obviously a joke
While he’s at it, he’ll probably start patent trolling Linux community for X window system.
Maybe this will finally kill Xorg
Wayland: Can I come out now?
Coming out is not a valid use case, and must be implemented by each individual compositor with incompatible protocol extensions.
Does that sentiment include Xwayland, Xlib, and the X protocol? What’s the alternative to X, the Windows Remote Desktop Protocol?
Aw man, I was trying to angrily shout racist hate speech into the void, but instead I ended up uninstalling Windows completely…
This confusion is exactly why Elon needs to protect his new trademark!
I can understand a company like Google (Alphabet) and Facebook (Meta) re-branding their wider business infrastructure. Twitter is just Twitter. X is just nostalgia, and Musk is being totally irresponsible with these announcments. He is a petulant little child, looking for attention and the likes. Damn childish - his entire Twitter venture.
How is ‘X’ nostalgia?
Elon started x.com back when he was balding.
And he never grew up from then.
But wasn’t x.com PayPal?
Yes, mostly.
X.com was Musk’s site after he worked at Scotiabank. They merged with another site that had a product called Paypal that was getting some traction. Musk tried to tie the other services X.com was offering at the hip with Paypal, and if you’re old enough you probably remember a “Paypal by X.com” (or similar) branding back when you needed to buy a used 56k modem from eBay.
Musk wanted to rebrand everything to x.com, was a huge baby about it, and got pushed out as an executive and replaced by Peter Thiel. A few years ago, Musk purchased the X.com domain name from Paypal like it was a treasured childhood sled, and he’s finally found something (very stupid) to do with it.
Maybe he shoulda just stuck with the bird, or thought of a name that is even a tad more creative. I’m pretty sure a hamster or a piece of paper could do a better job at managing Twitter than Muskrat is right now.
He does it about as well as I’d expect a muskrat to do it, to be fair
He killed the canary. There’s no better iconography for how toxic Twitter has become.
At what point does the game Xcom become involved… That shit has been around forever, and is definitely very close to X.com
Never because that’s not how trademarks work.
That’s… not how that works.
The brand isn’t “x.com” either, it’s “X”. They don’t even use x.com as a domain.
Even if it was x.com, a video game being called Xcom wouldn’t be close enough to the website x.com to be able to be confused. It would be different if they both were websites.
x.com is up and running now (redirect to twitter.com), used to be a GoDaddy placeholder just yesterday.
They do plan to switch to the x.com domain and already own it.
I thought elon owns x.com?
Yup. Owned personally since 2017. It was his also around 2000, but he got kicked out and the domain was then owned by Paypal.
Patent? lol
the amount of times I’ve read an internet article about this topic only to be met with a shockingly trivial mistake present front and center is staggering. the differences between patent, trademark, wordmark, etc. are all easily googleable and yet pretty much every article I’ve read on this has been using them interchangeably.
incoming rhetorical question: are these editors orangutans? (before anybody answers, i know editors & authors want to be the first one out the door so they get the most clicks and all that, but it’s really not hard to make sure you’re at least using the correct word. It seriously took me 20 seconds to find an answer on the difference between patent and trademark)
I think a lot of the issue is the widespread use of the term Intellectual Property which, arguably deliberately, conflates a few completely distinct legal concepts under one umbrella.
It’s intentional in the sense that they all involve intangible works of the mind and are only “property” in the legal system due to developments much, much later than the “I’ll bash you with a club if take my food” or the “I’ll stab you with a spear if occupy my farm” social contracts of personal and real property. It was very useful for those learning the law.
You’re right that they do very different things in society though, and it’s not particularly helpful outside the legal profession to bundle them so tightly together. Trademarks in particular should only protect branding and identity and when not abused provide a pretty valuable direct service for consumers in that you know who you’re dealing with.
The other two protect creators and therefore indirectly promise to “encourage innovation” that should benefit everyone, but they’re literally nothing more than legalized, if limited, monopolies. As Disney has shown though, you can smear the edges of copyright and trademark until they start to blend together.
Thank you for announcing the rhetorical question. I don’t think I would have been prepared for that.
deleted by creator
The amount of people in general that don’t understand even the most basic shit about trademarks or how they differ from copyright and often mix up the two is staggering really.
The Librarian would be much more meticulous tyvm.
Of course they made the trivial mistake, because they also made a much, much bigger one. The X trademark as it pertains to social media is owned by Meta, who bought it from Microsoft when they acquired Mixer (which later became Facebook Gaming), including Mixer’s X logo.
omg its raymomf in the wild
This raises the question, why was a company allowed to trademark a letter?
You can’t trademark a letter. Trademarks are extremely narrow and are only meant to apply in circumstances where one organization’s symbol could be confused for another. In general I am very anti-intellectual-property, but trademarks are okay in my book. They are basically for consumer protection.
@pruwybn @storksforlegs In the future, everytime you use the letter X, even to text, you will be charged a fee of x amount of cents based on your income.
Will you be charged a fee for using the letter as a variable in that statement?
Eh. If I start my X Laundromat business, Microsoft won’t come after me.
@pruwybn @storksforlegs
Because *money*
It is context sensitive
Knock knock, open up the door, it’s a subpoena
Trademark infringement means a judge wants to see ya!
X gonna serve it to ya
Other articles saying Meta owns x hot potato
Clearly the original was Mythos Games when they produced XCOM. Musk just added a fucking dot and thought that made it “original”.
This just gets better and better
Whats microsoft doing with X?
Aside from ActiveX, DirectX and Xbox…
from trademark (note registered in 2003)
in short: basically what they did in the ensuing years with Xbox and Games for Windows - Live
Xbox Series X, Surface Pro X,
X-Men, X-ray, X-chromosome, XVideos, Lil Nas X, Final Fantasy X…
Wait, what were we listing again?
iPhone X… It’s not like X, the latin letter, is owned and used by Microsoft only.
That’s a number.
Asteri10
Cisco owned the “iPhone” trademark and was actively using it to sell products. Weirder things have happened.
Apple simply started using it and told Cisco, “Make me stop”.
Actually iOS, not iPhone. I think if it were iPhone itself, an actually marketed product from either Apple or Cisco, it would have ended a bit differently. But in both cases, it was just iOS, the operating system of the marketed products.
In both cases, iOS was a selling point of the product, but not the product itself.
No, it was actually iPhone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_iPhone
Huh, I never heard of that one, I knew they licensed iOS.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/08/cisco_licenses_ios_name_to_apple_screenshot_shows_iwork_on_iphone
I’m surprised Cisco let iPhone go so easily, considering the immediate popularity of the brand when Apple released theirs.
Seriously, they let it go for nothing. When did Apple and Cisco ever integrate products?..
Edit: Also it says they’re both allowed to use it. I would love to see Cisco come out with an “iPhone” in 2023 lol
Honestly, there would probably be far more backlash against them than benefit. But it would be hilarious.
I wonder if they got some help with early app development, or something. I’ve always avoided Cisco, so I don’t know if they offered any mobile management or monitoring tools early on.
To which Cisco replied “okay” and forced Apple to agree to an unknown but likely ludicrous licensing fee.
Twitter got Apple money right now? Because even Elons billions aint shit compared to Microsofts literal trillions.
Microsoft doesn’t have trillions. Where did you get that from?
Microsoft is a 2.6T dollar company…
Market capitalization means that every share of MSFT combined at the current price is worth $2.6T. The company has $100B cash on hand. That’s actual cash and investments that could be easily converted to cash. Substantially less than $2 trillion.
Oh, only a $100 billion? Wow what poors, guess they’re fucked.
Isn’t that still a fuck-ton more than what any of their competitors have at their disposal?
Yeah, but by that logic, Musk isn’t a billionaire either.
And as a public company, Microsoft has a lot more options to leverage their equity than a private company or individual does.
Musk owns stock worth billions. Stock is a liquid asset, meaning he has billions in liquid assets. The $2.6T market cap is what the public shares of MSFT are “worth.” They are owned mostly by people and orgs other than Microsoft, meaning that value is not an asset to Microsoft.
Your comment is low-effort. Don’t do that.
Twitter’s got so little money that they can’t even pay all their bills, lol.
Honestly I think they rolled out the new branding without finishing it because they can’t afford proper designers or project managers. The site still says “Twitter” all over the place and they can’t even trademark the new logo.
Apparently they’ve hired an intern level designer then fired them after 2.5 weeks, once they handed in the design proposal.