Everyone might still refer to X as Twitter, but for all legal purposes, that name is dead and gone. But if X owner Elon Musk doesn’t see the value in the name, a startup called Operation Bluebird apparently does. The company filed a petition this week with the US Patent and Trademark Office to cancel X’s trademarks on the words “Twitter” and “tweet,” arguing that Musk’s operation has abandoned them.
“Abandoned” is a legal term in this sense, as Operation Bluebird’s petition claims abandonment as the grounds for why the USPTO should cancel X’s holding of Twitter’s legacy branding. “The TWITTER and TWEET brands have been eradicated from X Corp.’s products, services, and marketing, effectively abandoning the storied brand, with no intention to resume use of the mark,” the petition states.
There are a number of conditions that can be met for a copyright to be considered abandoned, including a company not using a copyright for three consecutive years or a failure to renew the registration. Perhaps most relevant to Operation Bluebird’s case, though, would be what legal experts call “intentional abandonment,” in which the owner of the copyright explicitly says they intend to stop using the trademark. After all, Musk stated publicly in July 2023 that his company would “bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”
That alone probably isn’t enough to completely count as abandonment, but it’s definitely not going to hurt the upstart’s case. Unfortunately, copyright laws can get pretty murky when it comes to how these rules are enforced. A paper published in the William & Mary Law Review in 2021 described copyright abandonment as being “largely ignored” by legal scholars and said case law is “fragmented and inconsistent.” Typically, that does not bode well for the little guy, but time will tell.
If Operation Bluebird does manage to snag the Twitter brand, it knows exactly what it’ll do with it. The founders told Ars Technica they plan to launch a Twitter alternative that will have the original name. There is no shortage of X alternatives at this point, but the branding alone may give their project, Twitter.new, a leg up. They reportedly already have a working prototype for the platform and have a sign-up page allowing people to claim their handle. They told Ars that they expect to launch late next year. This petition with the USPTO will likely determine what name they have when that happens.
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