Since Elon Musk announced his decision to remove the iconic bird logo and adopt "X", as Twitter's new logo (the "X Logo"), the rebranding decision has been the talk of the town. The rollout has prompted a barrage of reactions and has many questioning whether the change will attract legal hurdles. 

What You Need to Know:

• Registering a single letter as a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is a challenging process.
• Strong trademarks are distinctive and are evaluated by their level of distinctiveness.
• Consider whether abandoning a trademark and its goodwill outweighs the benefits of rebranding.

As defined by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a trademark is a word, phrase, symbol, design, or a combination of all these elements that customers use to recognize and distinguish a company from its competitors. Trademarks are source identifiers that allow consumers to distinguish goods and services in the market as originating from a particular source. For trademarks to become effective source identifiers they must be strong. Strong trademarks are distinctive and are evaluated by their level of distinctiveness, from suggestive (suggest a particular quality of the goods or services), fanciful (created solely for use as a brand), or arbitrary (unrelated to the industry of the goods or services it protects). Examples of strong trademarks are Dove®, an arbitrary trademark for personal care products, Adidas ®, a fanciful mark for apparel and footwear, and Airbus®, a trademark suggesting the source is a manufacturer of buses used for air travel.

Similarly, Twitter's former logo, a blue bird logo, is a strong and arguably suggestive trademark. Thus, when Elon Musk decided to rebrand Twitter and replace the word Twitter and the blue bird logo with a stylized "X", he left everyone scratching their heads because the USPTO requires a single letter trademark to be "distinctive, non-descriptive, and non-generic." Thus, selecting one single letter as a source identifier could be subject to challenges during the trademark approval process, unless Twitter's team can show the mark is distinctive and has acquired secondary meaning. Moreover, assuming arguendo that the X Logo overcomes initial eligibility challenges from the USPTO, there are nearly 900 active US trademark registrations that already cover the letter X including one from META and one from Microsoft. Although Microsoft's ownership of the trademark might not be a conflict due to it being registered in connection with videogame-related services, META's registration might be an issue. META currently owns the trademark for X in connection with "online social networking services…social networking services in the fields of entertainment, gaming and application development".

Despite the potential conflict, the X Logo might still be successfully prosecuted as it is "in line" with Mr. Musk's existing trademark catalog of X brands. Notably, Mr. Musk founded X.com, which eventually became PayPal, his space startup SpaceX, and most recently, he founded an AI company called X.ai. Additionally, his companies Space Exploration Technologies and Tesla, Inc., currently own two trademark registrations containing the letter X: Registration No. 4267520 for the trademark SPACEX and Registration No. 4846289 for MODEL X, respectively. Given the two registered trademarks feature the letter X, Mr. Musk's team will likely argue that consumers already associate the letter X with products and services originating from Mr. Musk's companies.

Businesses spend multiple financial resources and time to build their brands. Twitter's rebranding strategy sacrifices the goodwill associated with the blue bird logo. Without a doubt, Twitter's bird logo is a famous trademark that signifies our modern digital footprint and represents how our society consumes and reports content online. On the other hand, given the number of users on the platform, as well as the media following Twitter's rebranding strategy, it might not take long to establish that consumers associate the new X Logo with the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The new X Logo has garnered mixed reactions from users, and in response, Elon Musk wrote the X Logo will "keep evolving over time." Indeed, Twitter's rebranding journey will be one to closely follow.