“Tweet” and the bird logo apparently enter the public domain

(blog.ericgoldman.org)

130 points | by progval 6 hours ago

13 comments

  • thih9 5 minutes ago
    Looks like there is now a tweet.new (not the same as twitter.com ) run by Project Bluebird (not the same as Bluesky). Very confusing.

    The "Trust Dial" seems a new concept to be fair. Then again, it's just a concept and possibly AI generated like the rest of the page. I wonder what trust score would the website assign to itself at that point.

  • blfr 4 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.

    • ChrisRR 3 hours ago
      I just stopped using twitter and I've not actually felt like I've missed out
      • IAmBroom 6 minutes ago
        I'm even cooler. I never used it.

        Also, I don't watch TV and only smoke menthols. I mean vape. Or whatever.

      • irishcoffee 35 minutes ago
        I’ve never used any microblogging platform and feel like I’ve never missed out. :)
        • Brian_K_White 10 minutes ago
          Don't know why yer downvoted because this is for real and winning at life.
    • stymaar 1 hour 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.

      That's something we hear often but it's not grounded in an legal reality: trademarks are purely a form of intellectual property that a person (physical or moral) can hold and it doesn't come with any attached liability: you can't hold a company accountable for violating the trust built around its brand name in past year, and the owner is free to sell the brand name to another company or change their products in a way that mislead the consumer about its quality.

      In fact, should a trademark come with a promise about the quality of the product, Twitter would have lost it's trademark as soon as Elon transformed it into a disinformation machine (by breaking how the blue tick works and boosting paying account's content).

    • geocar 35 minutes 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.

      Nonsense. The core reason to enforce trademarks is to prove that you have it.

      The yo-yo used to be a trademark too, but the problem was what else do you call it? If the "owner" of a trademark cannot defend it, they don't have it. That's how trademark law is very different than copyright (which is implicit and automatic): You can lose a trademark even if you register it and popularise it, if you can't prove that the trademark represents your actual trade.

      > [I think] 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.

      That's your opinion man. Thankfully the law doesn't work that way.

      I don't even know whether you mean X (the new thing that was once twitter) or tweet (the new thing that claims to will-be what twitter once was)

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

      and that didn't help in the slightest, but domain squatting is very common on the Internet.

    • parl_match 4 hours ago
      I stopped going. Between the spam and the racist unmoderated AI slop cannon that is discovery there, what's the point
      • Cthulhu_ 3 hours 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.
      • solarkraft 4 hours ago
        I don’t even open twitter/x links anymore because the page is so unusable.
        • stymaar 2 hours ago
          I made the experiment some times ago: it's faster to edit the link, replace x.com with nitter.net and load the content from there, than wait until the original page load. The time difference isn't meaningful (it's less than a second), but the fact that a website loses against a manual redirection to another front end is still a spectacular proof of incompetence.
        • TFNA 2 hours ago
          I wonder if it is by design. On Nitter, which is fast-loading and streamlined, it is trivial to ctrl-click on a bunch of commenter accounts and readily see they are bots (photo from This Person Does Not Exist, unrealistically single-issue posting, etc.). On X where things move slow as treacle, it is harder for the average person to figure that out.
        • shevy-java 4 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.

      • chanux 2 hours ago
        Recently found textlog.cc here on HN. At times it felt (the content especially) like the early days of twitter.
  • weinzierl 4 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...

    • ChrisRR 3 hours 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

      • rsynnott 2 hours ago
        2009 was kind of a bizarre intermission. Don’t remember that at all, though I was certainly using Twitter at that point.
      • pprotas 3 hours ago
        Musk probably drew it himself
    • erk__ 3 hours 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
    • nolok 4 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.

      • dubbel 2 hours ago
        I just want to point out that if there was an outcry it wasn't by the actual (recently deceased) artist, who, according to Wikipedia, was happy to see his creation get this kind of visibility.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Oxley#Twitter_Bird_Logo_...

      • QuantumNomad_ 3 hours 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.

      • Dylan16807 2 hours ago
        Personally, when companies (or movies, or albums, or books, or games, etc.) become worth enormous amounts of money I think there should be bonus royalties for everyone involved even if they sold their labor for a flat rate.

        No, I don't have a good plan for how you'd calculate the distribution. But it would make windfalls more fair to the people that made them happen. And that kind of mechanism could also help fund many open source projects.

        • c22 54 minutes ago
          You can just add this to your contract if you think there's a good shot at success.
      • bsoqk 4 hours ago
        Not all outcries have to be entertained.
        • thaumasiotes 2 hours ago
          And similarly, when an outcry is worthless, it's valuable to tell the people involved that they should shut up. Outcries don't have to be entertained and they also don't have to be tolerated.
  • MatthewWilkes 4 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 3 hours 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.

    • dbbk 48 minutes ago
      No
  • HelloUsername 3 hours ago
    Related:

    "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

  • Animats 4 hours 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 4 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.

  • nunobrito 3 hours 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)

    • dewey 2 hours ago
      Mastodon and X both switched to “posts”. Toots was the old name.
      • account42 4 minutes ago
        Which has been the correct name since before Twitter existed. You can also use "message", or "comment" if its in reply to something else.
      • nunobrito 2 hours ago
        Yep, and didn't work.
        • dewey 2 hours ago
          In what way? I haven’t seen someone say “toot” in a very long time. Tweet I did but that was arguably more entrenched in pop culture over the years.
          • pferde 1 hour ago
            I guess it depends on what community/bubble are you in. Many fediverse users I know have always been, and will always be tooting.
    • pmlnr 3 hours ago
      Microblogging.

      That's the original term.

      • 0x69420 3 hours 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 3 hours ago
          Okay, what other catchy term instead of "president" would you suggest?
      • pino83 3 hours 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...

        • throw8494044o 2 hours ago
          The "phone" is probably landline or old 2G phone, iphone is internet connected smartphone (extra whatsapp etc).

          I remember having troubles voice calling iphone users, because of some roaming data bs, their device would not correctly fallback to 2g voice call on bad 4g connection, it tried to use data everywhere (voice call would just get ignored).

          Plus imessage does not correctly use sms protocol, instead tries to use internet and apples bs extensions. With bad connectivity it means sms will not reliably work on iphones!

          Super relevant in germany and their shitty 4g networks!!!

          • pino83 1 hour ago
            Heeey, our mobile networks are much less shitty than our railway services! :)

            Anyways, in such cases, I would try to get more competent hardware, instead of proudly advertize it in my email signature. Also, yeah, she was as competent as our mobile networks or our railway. When I subscribed the contract, she was making fun of another tenant who failed transferring money and then came with lame excuses like 'the bank account number was invalid'. In a very unfriendly German rich grandma way of making fun. Turned out when I tried to transfer the first rent: The bank account number was invalid... Well... At least she was precise with the mobile phone she had (not so much with its spelling, though). :)

            • account42 3 minutes ago
              > Heeey, our mobile networks are much less shitty than our railway services! :)

              Still mediocre compared to nearby countries.

        • Dylan16807 2 hours ago
          The brand name version from back in the day was calling them twits.

          Let tweeting ring free.

  • ryan_glass 2 hours ago
    This reminds me of a certain Southpark episode...
  • mrweasel 3 hours 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 3 hours 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?
      • rsynnott 2 hours ago
        Pretty sure lots of people would read x post as cross post, not just influencers. ‘X’ to stand in for cross is a fairly old convention; I think I’ve seen 19th century examples.
      • mrweasel 1 hour ago
        If you do it in person you have to say X with a slight look of disgust in your face, to let them know what you're talking about.

        Most people I know only knows about X/Twitter from the news cycle, it's not something they themselves use, it's just the platform used by journalists, politicians and commentators. It's not a place normal people go.

    • avhception 3 hours ago
      In German media, they always have a little "X (formerly Twitter)" thing. The rebrand is completely ridiculous.
    • Hugsbox 2 hours ago
      Right, because there was always such a weak connection between Twitter and "social media".

      It's a patently boneheaded branding decision, there's no way to spin it as even potentially smart.

    • luplex 3 hours ago
      German editorialized media always refers to it as a Short Message Service (Der Kurznachrichtendienst "X").
    • nottorp 1 hour ago
      "The service formerly known as Twitter"...
    • UltraSane 2 hours ago
      It is easily one of the most stupid and arrogant business decisions in history. The Twitter brand was easily worth billions and changing to X wiped out an estimated $4 billion to $20 billion in brand value overnight.
  • amazingamazing 2 hours ago
    I remember when there was a big wave towards bluesky, mastodon and threads. Here we are, every day twitter/x is on the front page.
    • ruperthair 2 hours ago
      On the front page for the latest footgun incident? IMO, bluesky is doing great, BTW.
  • shevy-java 4 hours ago
    A small, but nonetheless strategically important, defeat for the billionaire Elon "my right arm constantly twitches into a straight arm" musky Musk.
  • throw3212 4 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • cwillu 3 hours ago
      Yes, but what does that have to do with the article?
    • whatsupdog 4 hours ago
      I remember when people were called racist just for asking more border control. What's the new definition now?

      My point is that this term has been used so loosely, it has lost its meaning. Racist used to be someone who really despised black/brown people. Now every Trump voter is apparently a racist.

      • johneth 3 hours ago
        > My point is that this term has been used so loosely, it has lost its meaning.

        Have you taken a look at X/Twitter lately? There is a lot of out and out racism. Don't give the benefit of the doubt that it's just people who want "border control".

        • alt227 1 hour ago
          In the same vein, dont assume that anything negative said about a group of people is racism.