I want Musk to lose but I hate the idea of a single letter being copyright.
Trademark, not copyright. It means that you can’t make something and call it “X” if there’s any chance that your “X” and their “X” might get mixed up. Google ran into this same problem when they created “Alphabet” - it was already a trademark of some German car manufacturer (probably Audi or BMW), but the court ruled that “Alphabet the car company” and “Alphabet the online services company” are far enough apart that the average user probably won’t confuse one for the other (although the Dove soap and Dove chocolate makes me doubt it). Twitter and Microsoft both offer online services. It might be enough of an overlap to constitute a trademark violation.
Oh damn, is that why chocolates have been tasting so weird lately? Ig I’ve been eating soap!
Copyright and trademarks are different things. In this case it looks like it applies mainly to the Xbox “X” logo like is seen on this (hilarious) page of the filing and is only for things related to messaging and gaming, so it’s not as broad as it sounds. Based on a cursory look at Google results from before July 1st, I can’t find any examples of Microsoft actually suing anyone for using the letter X, either.
Love your username!!!
This is my first thought. How does a company own a single letter? Why is this allowed?
What do you think is a reasonable cutoff for a trademark?
5 letters? 3? 2?
A full word that you made up.
deleted by creator
Pretty sure X has existed since Ancient Greece at least. Maybe even the Phoenicians before the Greek alphabet?
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
How does both meta and microsoft own the rights to “X”
Probably in different industries. I saw the MS patent is for game related stuff. I would assume metas is for social media stuff, or some other field they’re involved in.
Trademark, not patent. I wouldn’t normally correct you but there seems to be a whole lot of misunderstanding in this thread about the categories of intellectual property.
I was just about to ask that myself.
From what I understand, MS owns it in regards gaming, and Meta owns it in regards to social media.
Trademarks are very narrow. From my quick search Microsoft has ‘X’ marks in relation to Excel and Xbox.
Meta’s trademarks actually has the class, ‘Online social networking services,’ that will overlap with Twitter’s new name.
The design is also a unicode character.
Sort of. It’s how some fonts render that character. I’ve noticed it tends to look like the Twitter logo with Android’s default font, but it’s noticeably different in Firefox on Windows.
removed by mod
Make it double X’s for extra “salt to the fire” points.
deleted by creator
Hard to tell if he’s winning or losing. If he’s being incentivized to destroy the integrity of a mainstream information-sharing platform, he’s done well. If he in any way wanted to run the company, he’s done laughably bad. I guess time will tell
I’ve always been kind of tin-foil-hatty about that. Like there’s no way he can actually fucking suck this much at this, right? It really seems like somebody paid him to take down a major information sharing platform that helps to further protests and other organized dissent.
deleted by creator
As amusing as it is to see Elon fail, letters like “X” shoud not be trademarkable. Just one indicator that we’re truly reaching capitalist extremism levels of insanity.
Trademarks only cover very significant uses. Microsoft can (and apparently did) trademark X in connection to the Xbox, so competitors can’t make a game console called an XStation or PlayStation X, but people not making video game consoles aren’t affected.
[Edit: Man, Lemmy is weird. I deleted this comment right after posting it because I thought it was redundant. I only undeleted it because I saw it was the top-rated comment in its sub-thread.]
You can also protect colors. Like there is a defined “target red” and “home depot orange” (probably a twitter blue that I guess will be up for grabs soon). You could use that orange to open, say, a day-care, hair salon, or auto-shop, but not a hardware store. Basically if you can show it would cause consumer confusion you can protect it.
Trademarks are a government-enforced (i.e. publicly-mandated) monopoly, which is fundamentally antithetical to capitalism.
Capitalism: “an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.”
For sure, there are many shades of grey to be had here, and the world has 0 purely capitalist societies (in fact, such a society is inherently impossible). But every time the public controls trade and industry, e.g. when enforcing trademark law, that isn’t capitalism.
Private property laws are a government-enforced (i.e. publicly-mandated) style of ownership.
Fure sure, there are many shades of grey to be had here, but Elon Musk owning Twitter is the ultimate form of communism.
The law is a weapon of the rich. You don’t have to be right, you just have to be able to afford out-lawyering your competition. Patents are especially revolting.
Of course, my question was rhetorical. I guess it didn’t come out so clearly considering it’s also, at least in theory, a damned good question.
It was probably clear enough, you just caught me half-asleep and unmedicated. I really dislike patents.
How is Xorg a “direct competitor” to Microsoft? Especially Microsoft’s trademark to X in the gaming market where they own the Xbox and Xorg doesn’t participate at all?
Trademarks protect consumers by preventing fraud and misleading naming. It makes perfect sense that Microsoft owns X in the given market space due to the enormous prevalence of Xbox. Their first console was literally X-shaped and it would be bad for consumers for anyone to be able to make the “X-station” or “X-cube” or some such.
One could not imagine Linux without X11 in 2003. And in 2003, the situation between Microsoft and Linux was rather tense.
That said, I managed to somehow forget about Xbox. I agree it makes sense that Sony couldn’t launch an “X console” with a gigantic X on the side.
So yes, I want thinking it through. I do however think that using this trademark against X.xom would be ill conceived, no matter how much I hate Musk. If they start moving into gaming it might be different though, so fair enough.
Thanks for making me think it through more! :)
“You better not touch the F word! Call of Duty did it first!”
Welp. I can see it happening.
Trademarks can apply to different areas. In this case, Microsoft’s trademark is for services related to online chat and gaming, not for something like a window manager.
Makes sense I guess. Somehow also makes the trademark even more absurd.
Reminds me a little of Apple v. Apple Records, and how Apple promised never too use their brand to enter into the music industry (like they later did with iTunes anyway).
In 1991, Apple Computer made an agreement to pay Apple Records $26 million in exchange for letting Apple Computer use the “Apple” trademark for music. But that was long before iTunes, they wanted the Apple trademark for their computer chimes. Apple Records agreed to let Apple Computer use the Apple trademark for music as long as it did not “package, sell or distribute physical music materials.”
Much later, iTunes was developed and Apple Records sued Apple Computer. Eventually a judge sided with Apple Computer, pointing out that iTunes did not package, sell or distribute physical music materials. Thus, Apple Records couldn’t get another bite of that Apple…
I thought it was nigh impossible to trademark a letter?
I saw a tweet from the founder of xe.com who literally used the same logo in the 90s and he discussed the challenges in globally trademarking a single letter.
Both aspects were giant cans of worms for El Musky.
I’m glad we’re currently on a good news streak. Those climate change articles were weighing on me.
Agreed lol
I thought you couldn’t take a trademark that already exists. At least in my country when I applied my trademark I had to use a portal to check it didn’t exist and the service writes that they check too. Not sure about that but at least it’s supposed to be checked and blocked if already taken.
Yeah definitely don’t need to check that out beforehand
For as much as the reddit/Lemmy communities claim to hate Elon they talk about him constantly.
Elon 2028
removed by mod
You do realize he was born in South Africa so is therefore ineligible to hold the office of President right?
News sites talk about news. That includes things that people don’t like.
It’s kind of like saying:
-Those guys on reddit sure do talk about Walmart taking advantage of their workers even though they hate capitalism
-Climate activists talk about climate change a lot, I thought they hated it?
-Why does fox news spend so much time hating on democrats? Don’t they know that they aren’t supposed to talk about stuff they disagree with?
Elon doesn’t have to be liked to be relevant.
We used to get this bullshit all the time on r/atheism on Reddit. “You guys sure talk about religion/God a lot for atheists.” What the fuck else are a bunch of atheists getting together going to talk about, baseball?
Hard to not talk about a train wreck.
Especially if the train somehow managed to dismantle tracks that is going to run on.
I meannnn I don’t “hate” Musk, but boy…. Is he an idiot who deserves all the shit that he gets. My 7yr old is probably smarter than him atm.
