The name change of what was called Twitter to X.com will have been a fiasco on every level.
Because in addition to giving up on a powerful, highly identified brand image because its owner did not want it (which notably coincided with a 30% drop in downloads of the application), the company forgot to do some checks. Among the latter, ensuring that a company with the same name did not already exist. Bad luck, that’s the case.
This is how a Florida communications company filed a complaint in federal court against the social network. Her name ? X Social Media. Not too surprisingly, this company claims that the name change from the former Twitter caused confusion among its potential customers and led to a drop in revenue. The fact remains that this umpteenth lawsuit against the social network is not the one that has the best chance of succeeding.
A new lawsuit for X.com
For X Social Media, the news of the name change decided by Elon Musk must have inevitably cast a chill. The company’s natural referencing is probably already destroyed, and for a long time, lost between posts from the social network and articles mentioning it. As for the company’s managers, they may not really want to be associated with the businessman’s company. From this point of view, it is certainly already too late for that, and the company will probably be forced to change its name on its own.
However, having registered the “X Social Media” brand since 2016, the company hopes to recover at least part of what it estimates to have lost in revenue following this name change. For X.com, this means one more line on the long list of lawsuits that the social network already has to face. Hopefully the legal department wasn’t too affected by the massive layoffs at Twitter earlier this year.
Can we really have intellectual property over a simple letter?
However, even though the “X Social Media” brand has been registered, it is not certain that a judge will rule in favor of this communications company. Law professor Alexandra Roberts explained to The Verge that the almost unlimited number of companies and other entities having registered “X”, or any other simple letter of the alphabet, in fact made their intellectual protection almost impossible to enforce.
So if X.com wins this case, it could also mean that everyone can, in turn, launch companies called X.org or some variation of that name.
Source : The Verge
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