On Thursday, Elon Musk's X won a court order blocking Operation Bluebird from launching a new app taking over the Twitter name. In his opinion, Chief Judge Colm Connolly explained that Operation Bluebird was unlikely to prove that X had entirely abandoned the Twitter name. Therefore, X was likely to succeed on trademark infringement and dilution claims tied to the platform's former name.
Most compellingly, X argued that it still uses the Twitter name in the current listing for the X app in Apple's App Store. In the first sentence of that listing, written in the same size font as the rest of the text, a single clause clinched the early court win for X by stating, Welcome to X (formerly known as Twitter).
X's legal director, Naser Baseer, testified that X deliberately added that clause to ensure that people who were searching for the Twitter app within the App Store, as well as people who were searching for the Twitter app outside of the App Store, would find the Apple app link and have an understanding that this is one and the same app, same platform, Connolly said.
Additionally, survey evidence showed that people still think Twitter's a famous brand, and X showed that despite wiping the name from its platform, the company still takes advantage of the goodwill that the commercially strong initial brand maintains by associating X with Twitter in the App Store, Connolly wrote.
By virtue of the parenthetical, the listing is telling customers that what they knew as Twitter is now X and can be accessed by downloading the X app from the Apple App Store, Connolly said.
However, X was not as successful in its claims that it had not abandoned other Twitter marks, including uses of the term tweet and the bird logo. Musk's public claims that soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds and we're cutting the Twitter logo off the building with blow torches provided compelling evidence that X Corp. harbors an intent not to resume use of the Tweet mark and Bird logo, the judge found.
Operation Bluebird President Stephen Coates celebrated the outcome in a press release. They kept the word, Coates said. They let go of the bird, and they let go of the tweet.
Durk Barnhill, Operation Bluebird's chief marketing officer, told Ars that we think this is a huge win and confirmed that the rival app was immediately renamed following the court's order. Operation Bluebird has already rebranded, declaring in a press release that Tweet.App will be the platform's new name.
For Operation Bluebird, the goal is to launch a service to rival Musk's that is member-owned, rather than billionaire-owned and controlled. For $20, users can join and get rid of X's trust problem, the tweet.app site said.
Operation Bluebird is working through bugs, and the redirect will likely be fixed soon.
