As a rule, you shouldn’t change an iconic name unless you’ve got a damned good reason to. Prince deciding to go by “The Love Symbol”? He was sticking it to Warner Bros. for the sake of his art. Penn deciding to go by Carey and punish anyone who stepped out of line? Stupid, but at least there was a $125M rationale behind it. Why was Twitter changed to X? Who knows, and that’s why it probably wasn’t worth the incoming lawsuit. Reuters has coverage:
Elon Musk’s X social-media platform violates the trademark rights of PR firm Multiply, according to a lawsuit filed in California federal court that was made public on Monday.
The complaint said that X, formerly known as Twitter, causes consumer confusion by using the “X” trademark for social-media marketing services that compete with Multiply.
Multiply has been using “X” for branding since 2019. I think that the glaring question here is “Why now?” Stupid as it might have been, the switch from Twitter to X happened back in July 2023 — why wait a whole year to make the trademark claim? You’d have to have been under a rock to not have known about Twitter’s gritty teenage rebranding.
If you’d like to follow the case closely, it’s called DB Communications LLC d/b/a Multiply v. X Corp, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:24-cv-04402.
X Corp Hit With Lawsuit From PR Firm Over ‘X’ Trademark [Reuters]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.