Hacker News

“Tweet” and the bird logo apparently enter the public domain

84 points by progval 4 hours ago | 39 comments

blfr 3 hours ago

The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name. So the trademark should hold for as long as a reasonable person can be confused by the new Twitter regardless of people's dislike towards Elon.

I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.

ChrisRR 59 minutes ago

I just stopped using twitter and I've not actually felt like I've missed out

parl_match 2 hours ago

I stopped going. Between the spam and the racist unmoderated AI slop cannon that is discovery there, what's the point

Cthulhu_ 44 minutes ago

I never went (just don't like it), but for a long time it was a primary source for a lot of important things so one kinda gets exposed to it anyway indirectly and / or through embeds. But that's the filtered version, anyway.

solarkraft 2 hours ago

I don’t even open twitter/x links anymore because the page is so unusable.

shevy-java 2 hours ago

Same here. There is always the "log in" nagging pop-up. But I will never log in again to the right-arm-gesture guy, so this is just time wasted for me.

We could need some decentralized way to share "tweets" though. Not linked to greedy billionaires.

flawn 2 hours ago

If you want to share tweets from X, there is exactly that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283

1over137 32 minutes ago

fb and insta have the same annoying login screens too. seems like most of the web does these days.

weinzierl 2 hours ago

Probably not many do remember, but before this logo Twitter had a different bird logo until the company was already quite big.

If I remember correctly this logo was allegedly bought from a royalty free image platform and Twitter had no exclusive rights to it. Also there was a little outcry that the original artist just received the royalty free platform usual ridiculously small one time payment.

EDIT: The one I remember is the second one in the timeline image from the following (unfortunately ad infested) article, so apparently it was not the first one they had.

https://www.afaqs.com/news/digital/has-musk-gone-too-far-wit...

ChrisRR 60 minutes ago

I think that image really visualises how bad the x logo is

https://img-cdn.thepublive.com/filters:format(webp)/afaqs/me...

The original logos weren't great but they were more charming than X

rsynnott 14 minutes ago

2009 was kind of a bizarre intermission. Don’t remember that at all, though I was certainly using Twitter at that point.

pprotas 24 minutes ago

Musk probably drew it himself

erk__ 21 minutes ago

$ \mathbb{X} $

7bit 11 minutes ago

I don't think he'd be able to come up with this.

erk__ 22 minutes ago

Simon Oxley designed quite a few of the most well known animal logos in the tech world today including GitHub's Octocat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Oxley

nolok 2 hours ago

> Also there was a little outcry that the original artist just received the royalty free platform usual ridiculously small one time payment.

I mean, if I tell you I'm to sell something to you for 5 dollars and you will be allowed to do this or that with it, and you give me the 5 dollars and then do this or that, it's a bit ridiculous to then have an "outcry" that you were successfull at doing this or that so you owe me more.

Not trying to offend but artists willing to make bird logo for cheap are a dime a dozen, which is why those site exists in the first place, and they didn't care about which one exactly which is why they went on that site to buy it; it's ot like there was any vile or unfair action being done there.

QuantumNomad_ 47 minutes ago

A lot of the royalty free images I have bought prohibit using the imagery as part of the logo for a company.

But maybe the platform where the bird graphic was sold did not say any such thing in the licensing terms. In which case, tough luck to the artist.

And on the other hand, if there were such terms agains using the graphic as your logo then the artist should have sued and gotten a sizeable payment.

bsoqk 2 hours ago

Not all outcries have to be entertained.

thaumasiotes 7 minutes ago

And similarly, when an outcry is worthless, it's valuable to tell the people involved that they should shut up. Outcries don't have to be entertained and they also don't have to be tolerated.

MatthewWilkes 3 hours ago

Is it accurate to describe this as the public domain? I would expect that the bird logo still enjoys copyright protection, independent from its status as a trademark.

camkego 43 minutes ago

The final paragraph says this, among other things:

"The court ruled on a preliminary injunction request, so it’s not the final word on the merits. Still, it seems highly likely that the TWEET term and the bird logo have been freed from X’s trademark clutches. If so, it’s nice to get some cultural assets back into the public domain"

Seems kind of dubious to say the least.

HelloUsername 2 hours ago

"Twitter Is Back at Twitter.now" 26.aug.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49455791 19 comments

"New Twitter rebrands to Tweet.app after court's double-edged ruling" 06.sep.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49581979

"Twitter" 10.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223543 11 comments

"Former Twitter Attorney Files for 'Twitter' Trademark" 09.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208672 13 comments

"US startup seeks to reclaim Twitter trademarks 'abandoned' by Musk's X" 09.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203468

nunobrito 48 minutes ago

It always made more sense to call these tiny texts as "tweets" rather than "toots" (mastodon) or "status update" (generic) so it would be good having the right to use that term as public domain.

There have been worse names for this kind of updates in the past. At some point in time was common to "finger" someone online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)

pmlnr 44 minutes ago

Microblogging.

That's the original term.

0x69420 34 minutes ago

"did you see what the president just microblogged"?

come now, surely you understand why it would be beneficial to the commons to have a snappy, catchy term that already has purchase in the public imagination be free to use, right?

pino83 25 minutes ago

Okay, what other catchy term instead of "president" would you suggest?

thaumasiotes 3 minutes ago

King?

pino83 26 minutes ago

But people (around me at least) feel bad when they have to compose an entire sentence full of words without any brand names or corporate names inside. They feel like being separated from their mother or like they lost basic orientation when not in each sentence there is "an uber", or "my instagram", or "a youtuber", "a whatsapp", ..., ..., ...

The email signature of my former landlord was like that:

..... Phone: 012345 I-Phone: 543210

Funnily, that wasn't some US girlie, but a German grandma. Maybe she got some bad US food on some journey and it made her brain rot away. Yessss, of course, as a bonus, it's a somewhat uncommon way spelling... But, yeah...

Animats 2 hours ago

Trademarks are use it or lose it. OLDSMOBILE, for example, is a cancelled General Motors trademark for automobiles.[1] No cars sold, no trademark.

Rygian 3 hours ago

Decision from the judge "Issuance of the injunction precluding Bluebird's use of the Twitter-formative marks is contingent on X Corp.'s posting of a $500,000 bond."

Both X Corp. and Bluebird have asked to go to court on Nov 2027.

mrweasel 2 hours ago

I can't figure out if renaming Twitter to X is the stupidest branding decision I've ever encountered or if it's bloody brilliant.

Every time Danish media talks about X, they say "The social media X". So X in itself is completely unrecognizable, you actively have to mention that you're talking about the social media platform. That's is however also rather genius, because now the connection between X and "social media" is strengthened every time it's mentioned.

lexicality 2 hours ago

It's stupid. Every normal (ie not terminally online) person I speak to calls it twitter and is confused if I call it X. For some reason most of them think an "x post" is on instagram too. I guess because influencers call crossposting that?

rsynnott 9 minutes ago

Pretty sure lots of people would read x post as cross post, not just influencers. ‘X’ to stand in for cross is a fairly old convention; I think I’ve seen 19th century examples.

luplex 21 minutes ago

German editorialized media always refers to it as a Short Message Service (Der Kurznachrichtendienst "X").

avhception 25 minutes ago

In German media, they always have a little "X (formerly Twitter)" thing. The rebrand is completely ridiculous.

shevy-java 2 hours ago

A small, but nonetheless strategically important, defeat for the billionaire Elon "my right arm constantly twitches into a straight arm" musky Musk.

throw3212 2 hours ago

[flagged]

cwillu 31 minutes ago

Yes, but what does that have to do with the article?

whatsupdog 2 hours ago

I remember when people were called racist just for asking more border control. What's the new definition now?

My point is that this term has been used so loosely, it has lost its meaning. Racist used to be someone who really despised black/brown people. Now every Trump voter is apparently a racist.

johneth 2 hours ago

> My point is that this term has been used so loosely, it has lost its meaning.

Have you taken a look at X/Twitter lately? There is a lot of out and out racism. Don't give the benefit of the doubt that it's just people who want "border control".