“Abandoned” in this sense is a legal term, as Operation Bluebird’s petition claims abandonment as part of why the USPTO should revoke X’s hold on Twitter’s legacy branding. “The Twitter and Tweet brands have been removed from X Corp’s products, services and marketing, effectively abandoning the old brand, and there is no intention to resume using this brand,” the petition says.
There are a number of conditions that must be met for a copyright to be relinquished, including the company not using the copyright for three consecutive years or failure to renew the registration. However, perhaps most relevant in the case of Operation Bluebird would be what legal experts call “intentional abandonment”, in which the copyright owner explicitly states that they intend to stop using the trademark. After all, Musk said publicly in July 2023 that his company would “slowly say goodbye to the Twitter brand and all birds.”
This alone probably isn’t enough to count as complete abandonment, but it certainly isn’t going to hurt the upstart’s case. Unfortunately, copyright laws can be quite vague when it comes to enforcing these rules. A paper published in the William & Mary Law Review in 2021 described copyright abandonment as “largely ignored” by legal scholars and said the case law is “fragmented and inconsistent”. Usually, this doesn’t bode well for the little guy, but time will tell.
If Operation Bluebird succeeds in taking down the Twitter brand, he knows what he will do with it. The founders told Ars Technica that they plan to launch a Twitter alternative that will bear the original name. There’s no shortage of X options at this point, but only branding can propel their project, Twitter.new. They reportedly already have a working prototype for the platform and a sign-up page that allows people to claim their handles. They told Ars they hope to launch late next year. This petition to the USPTO will likely determine what their name will be when that happens.
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