According to USA Today, Twitter in its S1 the document it filed for its IPO states “There is a risk that the word “Tweet” could become so commonly used that it becomes synonymous with any short comment posted publicly on the Internet, and if this happens, we could lose protection of this trademark,”
Tweet is already in Merriam-Webster dictionary with the word defined as “a post made on the Twitter online message service.”
“What remains to be seen is how widely used the word Tweet becomes and whether it gets introduced into the general lexicon as a verb. If companies begin to use Tweet as a verb in generic reference to their products, Twitter’s trademark protections may come in question like xerox.
Xerox, of course, has been accepted into language use as verb to generically mean “to copy” and is defined in dictionaries as a verb.”
Although Twitter has filed a few UDRP on domain name containing the word Twitter it has not filed any on any domain name containing Tweet.
Twitter had to file a federal lawsuit to gain control over the trademark for the word Tweet which you can read about here,
Their proposed stock symbol : twtr.com
is for sale at well known brokerage…
when we researched couple of years back, they seemed to have tried to find a middle ground, letting others use the word tweet in their product names, as long as they stay in the twitter ecosystem….i think it would be tough to “invent” a quasi trademark, but it seems you can use tweet in a product name and stay within their parmaters, so im betting having a domain name might be quasi blessed also. just MHO
see full terms and dos and dont here
https://twitter.com/logo
” Make sure that if mentioning “Tweet,” you include a direct reference to Twitter (for instance, “Tweet with Twitter”) or display the Twitter brand or trademarks with the mention of “Tweet.”
See the section regarding Displaying Tweets and other content from Twitter if using Tweets or building a microsite.”
forgot to say great catch by the way Mr Berkens.. the hardest working man in the domain business. the other thing that caught me in the s-1 was under risks factors it drives home the point they they make money off other peoples content, and any reduction in the willingness of others to contribute content , unpaid, would affect their business.
page howe
http://qz.com/132000/here-are-the-secret-edits-twitter-made-to-its-ipo-filing-hoping-investors-wouldnt-notice/
Twitter IPO Valuation $12.8 Billion, Company Remains Unprofitable and in Debt
http://www.techvibes.com/blog/twitter-valuation-2013-10-04
Interesting post and comments. It is pretty well settled that a phrase or term that becomes part of any lexicon eventually can lose its trademark status. In other cases, it becomes difficult to defend the mark because of the common use of a term that represents a more generic product.
When was the last time you asked for a “facial tissue” or a “mimeograph”. Nope. You get a Kleenex or Xerox a document. These are older-school examples, but the precept is the same.
Google is running into the same issue, although I doubt very seriously they would be concerned with the term being used anywhere. Nobody ever says, “Bing that for me.”
Protecting the artwork, like the Twitter birdie or the Google logo, beveled or not, would be important, going forward, moreso than protecting a word that, other than its use in the Twitter ecosystem, has myriad generic applications and is, in fact, a generic term, to begin with.
The difference with Google is, of course, the domain is a typo of the actual mathematical term, googol. As for Xerox and Kleenex, well, they just had really good marketing people. Too good, perhaps. 😀