“Tweet” and the bird logo apparently enter the public domain (blog.ericgoldman.org)

79 pointsby progval3 hours ago35 comments

blfr 2 hours ago

The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name. So the trademark should hold for as long as a reasonable person can be confused by the new Twitter regardless of people's dislike towards Elon.

I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.

parl_match 2 hours ago

I stopped going. Between the spam and the racist unmoderated AI slop cannon that is discovery there, what's the point

solarkraft 2 hours ago

I don’t even open twitter/x links anymore because the page is so unusable.

shevy-java 2 hours ago

Same here. There is always the "log in" nagging pop-up. But I will never log in again to the right-arm-gesture guy, so this is just time wasted for me.

We could need some decentralized way to share "tweets" though. Not linked to greedy billionaires.

flawn 2 hours ago

If you want to share tweets from X, there is exactly that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283

1over137 21 minutes ago

fb and insta have the same annoying login screens too. seems like most of the web does these days.

Cthulhu_ 33 minutes ago

I never went (just don't like it), but for a long time it was a primary source for a lot of important things so one kinda gets exposed to it anyway indirectly and / or through embeds. But that's the filtered version, anyway.

ChrisRR an hour ago

I just stopped using twitter and I've not actually felt like I've missed out

weinzierl 2 hours ago

Probably not many do remember, but before this logo Twitter had a different bird logo until the company was already quite big.

If I remember correctly this logo was allegedly bought from a royalty free image platform and Twitter had no exclusive rights to it. Also there was a little outcry that the original artist just received the royalty free platform usual ridiculously small one time payment.

EDIT: The one I remember is the second one in the timeline image from the following (unfortunately ad infested) article, so apparently it was not the first one they had.

https://www.afaqs.com/news/digital/has-musk-gone-too-far-wit...

nolok 2 hours ago

> Also there was a little outcry that the original artist just received the royalty free platform usual ridiculously small one time payment.

I mean, if I tell you I'm to sell something to you for 5 dollars and you will be allowed to do this or that with it, and you give me the 5 dollars and then do this or that, it's a bit ridiculous to then have an "outcry" that you were successfull at doing this or that so you owe me more.

Not trying to offend but artists willing to make bird logo for cheap are a dime a dozen, which is why those site exists in the first place, and they didn't care about which one exactly which is why they went on that site to buy it; it's ot like there was any vile or unfair action being done there.

bsoqk 2 hours ago

Not all outcries have to be entertained.

QuantumNomad_ 36 minutes ago

A lot of the royalty free images I have bought prohibit using the imagery as part of the logo for a company.

But maybe the platform where the bird graphic was sold did not say any such thing in the licensing terms. In which case, tough luck to the artist.

And on the other hand, if there were such terms agains using the graphic as your logo then the artist should have sued and gotten a sizeable payment.

ChrisRR an hour ago

I think that image really visualises how bad the x logo is

https://img-cdn.thepublive.com/filters:format(webp)/afaqs/me...

The original logos weren't great but they were more charming than X

pprotas 13 minutes ago

Musk probably drew it himself

erk__ 10 minutes ago

$ \mathbb{X} $

erk__ 11 minutes ago

Simon Oxley designed quite a few of the most well known animal logos in the tech world today including GitHub's Octocat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Oxley

MatthewWilkes 2 hours ago

Is it accurate to describe this as the public domain? I would expect that the bird logo still enjoys copyright protection, independent from its status as a trademark.

camkego 32 minutes ago

The final paragraph says this, among other things:

"The court ruled on a preliminary injunction request, so it’s not the final word on the merits. Still, it seems highly likely that the TWEET term and the bird logo have been freed from X’s trademark clutches. If so, it’s nice to get some cultural assets back into the public domain"

Seems kind of dubious to say the least.

HelloUsername an hour ago

"Twitter Is Back at Twitter.now" 26.aug.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49455791 19 comments

"New Twitter rebrands to Tweet.app after court's double-edged ruling" 06.sep.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49581979

"Twitter" 10.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223543 11 comments

"Former Twitter Attorney Files for 'Twitter' Trademark" 09.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208672 13 comments

"US startup seeks to reclaim Twitter trademarks 'abandoned' by Musk's X" 09.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203468

nunobrito 37 minutes ago

It always made more sense to call these tiny texts as "tweets" rather than "toots" (mastodon) or "status update" (generic) so it would be good having the right to use that term as public domain.

There have been worse names for this kind of updates in the past. At some point in time was common to "finger" someone online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)

pmlnr 33 minutes ago

Microblogging.

That's the original term.

0x69420 24 minutes ago

"did you see what the president just microblogged"?

come now, surely you understand why it would be beneficial to the commons to have a snappy, catchy term that already has purchase in the public imagination be free to use, right?

pino83 15 minutes ago

Okay, what other catchy term instead of "president" would you suggest?

pino83 15 minutes ago

But people (around me at least) feel bad when they have to compose an entire sentence full of words without any brand names or corporate names inside. They feel like being separated from their mother or like they lost basic orientation when not in each sentence there is "an uber", or "my instagram", or "a youtuber", "a whatsapp", ..., ..., ...

The email signature of my former landlord was like that:

..... Phone: 012345 I-Phone: 543210

Funnily, that wasn't some US girlie, but a German grandma. Maybe she got some bad US food on some journey and it made her brain rot away. Yessss, of course, as a bonus, it's a somewhat uncommon way spelling... But, yeah...

Animats an hour ago

Trademarks are use it or lose it. OLDSMOBILE, for example, is a cancelled General Motors trademark for automobiles.[1] No cars sold, no trademark.

Rygian 2 hours ago

Decision from the judge "Issuance of the injunction precluding Bluebird's use of the Twitter-formative marks is contingent on X Corp.'s posting of a $500,000 bond."

Both X Corp. and Bluebird have asked to go to court on Nov 2027.

mrweasel an hour ago

I can't figure out if renaming Twitter to X is the stupidest branding decision I've ever encountered or if it's bloody brilliant.

Every time Danish media talks about X, they say "The social media X". So X in itself is completely unrecognizable, you actively have to mention that you're talking about the social media platform. That's is however also rather genius, because now the connection between X and "social media" is strengthened every time it's mentioned.

lexicality an hour ago

It's stupid. Every normal (ie not terminally online) person I speak to calls it twitter and is confused if I call it X. For some reason most of them think an "x post" is on instagram too. I guess because influencers call crossposting that?

avhception 15 minutes ago

In German media, they always have a little "X (formerly Twitter)" thing. The rebrand is completely ridiculous.

luplex 10 minutes ago

German editorialized media always refers to it as a Short Message Service (Der Kurznachrichtendienst "X").

shevy-java 2 hours ago

A small, but nonetheless strategically important, defeat for the billionaire Elon "my right arm constantly twitches into a straight arm" musky Musk.