In July 2023, Musk himself tweeted that “we will bid adieu to the twitter brand, and steadily, all of the birds.”
That was when Peroff, a Chicago-area attorney specializing in trademark and IP law, saw a possibility not only to say the name Twitter but additionally to make use of the enduring illustrated logo that was affectionately referred to internally as “Larry Bird.”
Peroff and others began formally organizing Operation Bluebird, a method to bring back Twitter in name, services, and format, catering specifically to business brands.
Some corporations have been reluctant to advertise on X for fear that they shall be related to unsavory content, akin to extremist views, scam-like posts, or pornbots. In September 2024, Kantar Marketplace, a market research firm, put out a study noting that 26 percent of surveyed marketers planned to desert their ad campaigns on X.
“We expect our moderation tools will help the discussion evolve into something more responsible,” Peroff said. “Brands are stuck on X because they haven’t any other place to go.”
While Threads, which is owned by Meta, began testing ads earlier this yr, only recently did it reach the size—around 400 million monthly lively users—that Twitter had on the time of its acquisition by Musk. Neither Mastodon nor Bluesky have any promoting in the interim.
Mark Lemley, a Stanford Law professor and expert in trademark law, told Ars that X might find a way to defend the Twitter marks if it may show that it remains to be using them.
“Mere ‘token use’ won’t be enough to order the mark,” Lemley wrote in an email. “Or [X] could defend if it may show that it plans to return to using Twitter. Consumers obviously still know the brand name. It seems weird to think another person could grab the name when consumers still associate it with the ex-social media site of that name. But that’s what the law says.”
Mark Jaffe, an mental property attorney in California who just isn’t involved within the case, thinks that X Corporation could have a battle to maintain the Twitter marks.
“Once it’s not outstanding on the web site and the owner, the CEO, says it’s now called this and never that,” he told Ars, “I don’t understand how you beat an abandonment argument.”
