David Bridges
Key Insights
- Trademark Status: Operation Bluebird seeks to cancel X Corporation’s trademarks for “Twitter” and “tweet”.
- Objective: The initiative aims to revive the original Twitter platform under the URL www.twitter.new.
- Legal Challenge: X Corp must demonstrate ongoing use of its trademarks to retain them legally.
- Future Prospects: Success for Operation Bluebird may face significant legal hurdles from Elon Musk.
Are you still pining for the glory days of Twitter, when tweeting was a broadly understood verb within regular conversation, and retweets actually meant something?
Well, Twitter, and its associated trademarks, could still make a comeback, though not through Elon and his “everything app” passion project.
As reported by Ars Technica, a Virginia startup calling itself “Operation Bluebird” announced earlier this week that it has filed a formal petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office to cancel X Corporation’s trademarks of the words “Twitter” and “tweet,” due to X essentially no longer using them, and abandoning the previous Twitter brand.
A founder of the group, Stephen Coates, posted on LinkedIn about the request earlier this week, explaining that:
“After 12 months of quiet work at Operation Bluebird, we’re stepping out of stealth mode to share something bold: we’ve filed a petition to cancel the TWITTER trademark and new applications for TWITTER and TWEET. This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about repairing what broke — because the public square is worth fighting for.”
If it’s successful in its bid, Operation Bluebird is then aiming to launch its own version of what Twitter was, under the URL www.twitter.new, which would be a first step towards restoring Twitter to its former state:
And as you can see, people are already signing up to reserve a handle on the new Twitter, though the likelihood of it actually succeeding as a real social media platform is pretty low, while the chances of Elon giving up these past Twitter trademarks without a fight are also marginal at best.
Though he may not have a choice. Operation Bluebird was founded by trademark attorneys, one of whom actually worked for Twitter in the past, and their claim is based on the fact that X is no longer making use of these trademarks. It should therefore have no legal claim to them, which is the loophole that Operation Bluebird is looking to exploit to get control of the Twitter IP.
X Corp will essentially need to prove that it’s still using these terms within its business. Otherwise, it could lose them, whether it likes it or not, which would then enable the Operation Bluebird team to launch an actual Twitter alternative, both in name and in process.
Though, again, it’s highly doubtful that Elon would allow this to happen, at least not without some significant, and likely long-running legal stand-off, that might render the project obsolete either way.
Musk has repeatedly demonstrated a pettiness in his business dealings, spending billions to target people who’ve wronged him, and pushing to maintain control of all elements of basically anything stemming from his projects.
A good example in this case is Musk’s efforts to throttle links to external sites from X, particularly to publishers that he personally dislikes, because he wants to keep the attention on X itself, not siphon that off to other providers. Musk sees X as being way more valuable than these external publishers and sites respect, and as such, he’s explored several ways to make business pay to keep getting traffic from his app.
Musk has also threatened legal action against Meta over the development of Threads, which has copied many of X’s key features, while he’s also explored legal action against other replicas that he sees as stealing from him.
That would suggest that he’s not going to give up the Twitter trademarks without a fight, whether he’s using them or not, and with a powerful team of lawyers on his side, Operation Bluebird will be in for a fight.
And even if it is successful, scaling a new social platform, even with the Twitter branding, will be difficult.
As such, I doubt that this project will become a bigger consideration in social media circles, but it’s another one to watch, and it could end up bringing Twitter back, albeit in a different form.
Would that be enough to get you in? Would the return of the bird elicit enough nostalgic reaction to spark a whole new social platform ecosystem?
If you’re at all excited, it could be worth heading to www.twitter.new to reserve your handle.
Maya Kensington
Clara Hastings
