The PR firm Multiply is suing Elon Musk’s X Corporation for trademark infringement and unfair competition, among other things.
A while back, Elon rebranded Twitter as X (dumbest rebrand ever, in my opinion; that friendly little bird icon had worldwide recognition and was a great brand; it even had its own verb — “to tweet” — and he instead replaced it with the cold and not terribly distinctive “X”. But I digress…
Multiply owns the trademark registration 5968076 for the term X for advertising and marketing services:
Multiply began using the mark in 2019; X Corporation adopted the mark for their social media company in July 2023.
Why is Multiply Suing For Trademark Infringement?
Multiply is alleging trademark infringement because X Corporation also offers marketing and advertising services to its customers, and is competing for the same clients with its advertising services.
But Angela, X is a social media company, and Multiply sells social media advertising services. How can those be similar goods and services?
Because both companies offer advertising services — X/Twitter sells advertising on its platform, and Multiply sells advertising and marketing services. Even if X Corporation’s main business is social media, X is, in essence, an advertising platform; that’s how the platform makes money. So that is one of the goods and services that they are offering in commerce.
How To Decide If It’s Trademark Infringement?
So what are the rules?
Trademark infringement occurs when a trademark user adopts a trademark that is “confusingly similar” to the trademark of a prior user, such that a consumer might be confused about the source of the goods and services.
If a consumer would ask the question, “I wonder if the goods and services from company A are related to those of company B,” then that’s enough to have a confusing similarity and a claim of trademark infringement.
Actual confusion need not be shown; a likelihood of confusion is enough to sustain a claim of trademark infringement.
Is This Trademark Bullying?
Here we have a big media company adopting the brand of a smaller media company, and I’ll bet money that they knew what they were doing when they decided on the brand. How do I know? Well, because X has attorneys, and attorneys do trademark searches.
Elon Musk likely knew, and just said, “Full speed ahead; we’ll deal with the fallout later,” because that seems to be his style. This is the sort of thing that I refer to as “trademark bullying,” when a larger company adopts the mark of a smaller company, and then uses the legal system as an abusive tool to oppress and harass their smaller competitor. I’ve seen this a few times in my own practice.
So what will happen?
I Predict Multiply Will Sell The X Trademark To X Corporation
I predict that “the company formerly known as Twitter” and Multiply will come to some sort of agreement that involves the exchange of money and the signing over of trademark rights. I’m not sure how Twitter thought this was going to work out; maybe they thought they were “too big to fail” and could bully their smaller advertising rival into submission. If that was the case, I hope that Multiply gets a handsome sum for their trademark.
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Contact Dallas, Texas trademark attorney Angela Langlotz today to get started on a trademark application for your valuable brand.