Twitter is already facing a number of lawsuits following Elon Musk's takeover of the company -- and now its rebrand could see it facing even more.
The billionaire announced on Sunday that Twitter was being rebranded as X, unveiling a new logo for the social media platform, a stylised black-and-white version of the letter.
According to experts, this rebrand could be legally complicated as other tech giants such as Meta and Microsoft already have intellectual property rights to the same letter, according to Reuters and EuroNews.
"There's a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody," said trademark attorney Josh Gerben, who said he counted nearly 900 active US trademark registrations that already cover the letter X in a wide range of industries.
Owners of trademarks - which protect things like brand names, logos and slogans that identify sources of goods -- can sue, claiming infringement, if other branding would cause consumer confusion.
This can result in monetary damages being demanded to blocking the use of the brand name itself.
Microsoft has owned an X trademark since 2003, which is related to communications about its Xbox gaming system. Meta Platforms -- whose Threads platform is a new Twitter rival -- owns a federal trademark registered in 2019 covering a blue-and-white letter X for fields including software and social media.
Meta and Microsoft likely would not sue unless they feel threatened that Twitter's X encroaches on brand equity they built in the letter, Gerben said. The three companies did not respond to requests from Reuters for comment. A Twitter press email account responded to a request for comment from Euronews with: “We'll get back to you soon.” Until recently, all emails sent to Twitter's press email address were replied to with a poop emoji.
Meta itself drew intellectual property challenges when it changed its name from Facebook. It faces trademark lawsuits filed last year by investment firm Metacapital and virtual-reality company MetaX, and settled another over its new infinity-symbol logo.
If Musk succeeds in changing the name, others still could claim X for themselves.
"Given the difficulty in protecting a single letter, especially one as popular commercially as 'X', Twitter's protection is likely to be confined to very similar graphics to their X logo," said Douglas Masters, a trademark attorney at law firm Loeb & Loeb.
"The logo does not have much distinctive about it, so the protection will be very narrow."
Meta's own copyright dilemma
A major battle is brewing over generative AI and copyright. Publishers want to be paid if their work has been used to train large language models. Big tech companies would rather not pay.
One way to avoid the issue is to just not tell anyone what data you used to train your AI model. Meta seems to be trying that tactic.
On Tuesday, the social-media giant released a massive new model called Llama 2. The research paper shares very little about what data was used.
"A new mix of publicly available online data," Meta researchers wrote in the paper. That's basically it.
This is unusual. Until now, the AI industry has been open about the training data used for models. There's a reason: This powerful technology must be understood, and its outputs must be as explainable and traceable as possible, so that if something goes wrong researchers can go back and fix things. Training data is key to how these models perform.
Take a look at the original Transformer research paper that kicked off the Generative AI boom. Those researchers disclosed granular information on the training data used. It included about 40,000 sentences from The Wall Street Journal. (Rupert Murdoch, did you know??)
When Meta released the first version of LLaMA in February, that research paper listed all its training data in a table and detailed paragraphs. It included a bunch of books and the Common Crawl data set, which is a humongous copy of the internet, amassed since 2008 and stored on Amazon's cloud, ready to download any time. That last data set made up more than two-thirds of the information Meta used to train LLaMA.
So what changed in the past five months?
Publishers, authors, and other creators have suddenly realized their work is being used to train all these AI models. Were they asked for permission? No. Will Big Tech companies get away with this? Maybe.
A slew of lawsuits are already challenging tech companies' right to use this information for AI model training. Sarah Silverman's complaint is probably the most famous so far.
New risk factors
Big Tech companies know this is a risk. Microsoft, backer of industry leader OpenAI, added this risk factor to its quarterly SEC filing recently.
"AI algorithms or training methodologies may be flawed," Microsoft wrote. "As a result of these and other challenges associated with innovative technologies, our implementation of AI systems could subject us to competitive harm, regulatory action, legal liability, including under new proposed legislation regulating AI in jurisdictions such as the European Union ("EU"), new applications of existing data protection, privacy, intellectual property, and other laws, and brand or reputational harm." (Copyright is an important part of intellectual property law.)
Google, another AI leader, does not like to pay for online content as this would undermine its highly profitable business model. The company's top lawyer Halimah DeLaine Prado has said US law "supports using public information to create new beneficial uses." This argument might prevail in court.
