A federal court has handed Elon Musk’s X a partial victory in a trademark dispute with a startup attempting to launch a rival social network. The ruling, issued in Delaware, blocks the startup from using the core Twitter name while opening the door for it to adopt the word “tweet” and the familiar bird logo.
The company at the center of the case, Operation Bluebird, first launched under the name Twitter.now. The court barred that branding, siding with X on the Twitter trademark. At the same time, the court found that X had likely abandoned two related marks: the word “tweet” and the Twitter bird logo. As a result, Operation Bluebird rebranded its site as Tweet.app and launched to the public.
A Bid for Abandoned Trademarks
The Virginia-based startup is upfront about its intentions. Its homepage states that the goal is to reclaim trademarks that Musk relinquished when he renamed the platform X and, in the company’s words, “threw the bird away on his way out.”
The effort is led by two attorneys: founder Michael Peroff, based in Illinois, and Stephen Coates, a former trademark lawyer at Twitter. Given their legal backgrounds, the venture appears aimed primarily at acquiring Twitter’s valuable trademarks rather than building an entirely new platform.
Despite that framing, Tweet.app has opened to users in early testing. The company said more than 172,000 people requested a handle before launch, a figure likely driven by lingering affinity for the Twitter brand. The startup charges users EUR 17 to reserve a handle and join the network, revenue that may help offset its legal costs.
A Split Ruling in Delaware
U.S. District Court Judge Colm F. Connolly issued a split decision on X’s request for a preliminary injunction. The motion sought to stop Operation Bluebird from using a series of Twitter trademarks the startup argues X abandoned after its rebrand.
The judge granted the injunction covering eight Twitter-related marks but denied it for the Tweet mark and the bird logo. In his opinion, he wrote that Bluebird was “likely to succeed in proving both that X Corp. discontinued the bona fide use of the Tweet mark and Bird logo and that it intends not to resume the use of the marks.”
The decision is not final. The case will proceed to determine whether X retains rights to any of the Twitter marks, given that the company now operates under the X name in most places.
“They kept the word. They let go of the bird, and they let go of the tweet,” wrote Coates, president of Operation Bluebird, in an emailed announcement about the rebrand. “A tweet was never a corporation. It’s one person saying something. That word survived three years of a company trying to replace it, because the public declined to stop using it. We think that tells you who it belongs to.”
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Image: techcrunch.com
