Elon Musk renamed Twitter to "X" as part of his latest company overhaul, but it looks like Meta already holds the rights to the name.
  • Pratai@lemmy.caEnglish
    711·
    11 months ago

    We live in an age where three massively bloated companies are going to battle it out over who owns a letter.

    That asteroid won’t come soon enough.

  • Prater@lemmy.worldEnglish
    661·
    11 months ago

    I hope I’m not alone in finding it utterly ridiculous that a company can literally hold rights over a single letter.

    • RheingoldRiver@kbin.social
      41·
      11 months ago

      Keep in mind that it’s in a particular context. It seems a bit ridiculous as a headline, but if they were actively using the branding, it might not seem so ridiculous: imagine Facebook (I will not call them Meta) is already operating a social media site for posting short thoughts called X with the TLD social (hypothetically). And they’ve been operating it as X for 10 years. Then Elon does this. Clearly Facebook has a suit because that’s straight-up infringement.

      This is a little more hazy because Facebook isn’t actively using their X trademark, and it’s not exactly the same as Twitter. But they do hold the rights to it (as far as I can tell from the one tweet (xeet?) about it). And it’s not (quite) as ridiculous as it sounds.

      Also,

      Twitter auto-replied to Insider’s request for comment with a message saying that the communications department would get back to us soon.

      Is this a euphemism for the poop emoji??

    • Poggervania@kbin.social
      5·
      11 months ago

      If it makes you feel any better, the CEO of Oracle, Larry Ellison, pretty much bought out the entire island of Lanai from the state of Hawaii.

      So a letter doesn’t surprise me too much.

    • fubo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      112·
      11 months ago

      Lots of big companies register lots of really dumb trademarks, even for things that they don’t end up producing. Most of them would be thrown out in court.

  • Captain_Ender@kbin.social
    93·
    11 months ago

    Really would be cool to stop seeing this shit all over the front page. Pretty sure a lot of us are here because we don’t care about these sites.

    • ebits21@lemmy.ca
      English
      41·
      11 months ago

      Memmy added the ability to filter posts by keywords recently. Very useful ;)

      • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.brEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        I need this on Jerboa. My filtered list on RiF was fucking huge, and you can bet fucking “elon”, “musk” and “elon musk” was in it (with Marvel, Star Wars and other cultural spam that I don’t give a shit about).

  • RickRussell_CA@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    Well, throw it in the closet with the electric guitar, the karate suit, the Boring Company, and that crazy vacuum train thing. Just another one of Musk’s dumb ideas that never got anywhere.

  • Melkath@kbin.social
    4·
    11 months ago

    All of the cage fight crap, and the Threads crap are a big show leading to Meta buying Twitter, Musk recouping some of his losses, and Zuckerberg getting his hands on the worlds personal data again to fire his intelligence contracts back up.

  • sudo_shinespark@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    Didn’t Xfinity recently rebrand itself to use just an X for most things, too?

    I’m beginning to question this guy’s decision making skills /s

  • magnetosphere@kbin.social
    4·
    11 months ago

    This is like reading about politics. Just when I think things can’t get any stupider…

    Edit:

    Twitter auto-replied to Insider’s request for comment with a message saying that the communications department would get back to us soon.

    They got an actual reply? No infamous 💩 emoji? That’s a story in itself.