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Everyone seems to be missing the interesting part here. It's that Twitter is using a generic Monotype font letter for their brand. Which would mean that their
by threeseed 3y ago
Everyone seems to be missing the interesting part here.
It's that Twitter is using a generic Monotype font letter for their brand.
Which would mean that their brand will not be able to be trademarked and thus anyone could use it to associate their dodgy product with the main site. So I wouldn't worry about Meta, Microsoft etc but about the insane number of X ripoffs we are going to see in the future e.g. X crypto coin, X bots.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoYou've confused copyright with trademark here.
- fomine3 3y agoA logo is a trademark
- sschueller 3y agoBut in this case the logo is a character that existed before hand. Nothing was designed or created, an existing typeface is being used as a logo.
- colonwqbang 3y agoTrademarks don't have to be original. It's very common for a mark to be just a word or words written in a standard typeface. Perhaps you are thinking of copyrights?
- bonoboTP 3y agoPeople are hopelessly confused in this area, which is intentional FUD by the "intellectual property" advocates. People, even tech enthusiasts on a platform like this have no idea what the origin and purpose of 1) copyright, 2) trademarks and 3) patents are, even though they are very distinct from each other and even more distinct from the oft-imagined purpose of protecting the company's creative whatever. The overall original purpose of all these laws pointed towards the interests of the public, not the interests of some "intellectual property" owner, similar to protecting actual ownership rights. The original purpose of trademarks is to prevent consumer confusion. That's it. It's not to protect the profits of a company. It's not to reward creativity and hard design work. The original purpose of patents is to encourage disclosing new innovative ideas in order that others can build on top of the invention after having read the patent text (and in exchange for revealing how the innovation works, the inventor gets exclusive rights for a set time, but this is an instrument in achieving the former main purpose). Similarly, copyright incentivizes creative output. (But it only protects the actual expression, not the underlying general ideas etc.)
- threeseed 3y agoTrademarks can be word mark or a design mark. Musk can't trademark the letter X and he can't trademark an existing font letter.
- 1shooner 3y agoTrademarks are comprised of existing fonts all the time.
- wolrah 3y agoI think the "single letter" part is important here. AFAIK trademarks can't be too simple and generic. Sort of like how Intel couldn't trademark 286/386/486, so instead of 586 we got Pentium.
- throwaway09223 3y agoNo, it's not important. It's just wrong, as clearly illustrated by the article we're all discussing. Microsoft applied for, and obtained, a trademark for "x". Companies do this all the time. Companies also trademark numbers all the time. Dale Earnhardt trademarked the number "1": https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75439039&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75439039&caseType=SERIAL_... Intel lost their trademark battle because they didn't attempt to register the trademark until the 486 - more than a decade after the numbers were in common use by other chip manufactures. It has nothing to do with whether the mark is simple.
- nashashmi 3y agoAre you sure it is the letter and not the graphic that is trademarked?
- zimpenfish 3y agoIt does say "Standard Character Claim: No" which (as best I can tell from [1]) means it is the particular form of that letter[2], not the letter itself, which is trademarked. [1] https://smallbusiness.chron.com/standard-character-claim-mean-trademark-59226.html https://smallbusiness.chron.com/standard-character-claim-mea... [2] Although it is a pretty generic "1".
- tzm 3y agoDid you mean Dogey product?
- zapdrive 3y ago[flagged]
- thatguy0900 3y agoI'm not usually one for puns here, but this one was quite apt.
- Grum9 3y ago[dead]
- xwdv 3y agoX WDV
- zgluck 3y agoMonotype Executive Creative Director Phil Garnham Executive told The Messenger in a statement that the company “can confirm that whilst it is similar, this is not the capital X glyph from Monotype’s “Special Alphabets 4.”
- speedgoose 3y agoAren’t all those "Company Name" in Helvetica trademarks?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dehrmann 3y agoI loved how American Airlines and Apparel both used Helvetica. These days, the one I find shocking is Monday.com and Slack. Both have names in lowercase black Circular, their logos use pill-shaped elements in similar shades of primary colors, and they're both in the business productivity space. The branding is so close you'd swear they're sibling products like IntelliJ and CLion.
- srik 3y agoRedrawing a font design outline from scratch is fair game (fortunately or unfortunaly depending on who you are).
- tim333 3y agoxHamster and many similar are already out there. Famously referenced in the How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus vid.
- trollied 3y ago𝕏 - it's just Unicode
- kvetching 3y agoGotta give it to Elon for going into uncharted territory once again.