Elon Musk may face legal difficulties after rebranding Twitter to X, trademark experts have warned, with tech rivals Meta and Microsoft both owning intellectual property rights for the letter. The tech billionaire renamed the social network on Monday, nine months after taking over the company in a $44 billion deal. The name change forms part of his plan to turn the platform into an “everything app”, which will offer services akin to China’s WeChat and India’s PayTM. X chief executive Linda Yaccarino said the company wanted to “transform the global town square” to integrate payments, banking and create a “global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities”. Before achieving this goal, however, IP lawyers claim Mr Musk’s firm may face challenges from its competitors. “There’s a 100 per cent chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody,” US trademark lawyer Josh Gerben told Reuters, noting that there are nearly 900 active US trademark registrations that already cover the letter X. These include Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which owns a federal trademark for a blue-and-white letter ‘X’ relating to “social networking services in the fields of entertainment, gaming and application development”. Microsoft also has registered trademarks for the letter ‘X’ relating to its Xbox video game console. Neither company responded to a request for comment. Mr Musk first owned the X.com domain in 1999, when he founded a financial services company that later went on to become PayPal. He reacquired the domain in 2017 after making a deal with his former company, before tweeting in October 2022 that buying Twitter was “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app”. It is not clear whether Mr Musk has applied for a trademark for X, but if he succeeds he may still face difficulties in protecting the registered rights against other brands using the letter. “The very essence of trade mark registration is obtaining an exclusive right to the brand that is registered,” Matthew Harris, a trademark lawyer with Pinsent Masons, told The Independent. “It may be difficult to obtain for Elon Musk under the ‘X’ rebrand, not to mention the difficulty, should he obtain registered protection, in trying to enforce any registered rights in ‘X’ against other brands using a similar name.” Read More What is Elon Musk’s ‘everything app’ X? Twitter to X: Why Elon Musk rebranded the social networking platform Twitter rebrands to X as Elon Musk loses iconic bird logo What is Elon Musk’s ‘everything app’ X?

Binance's global head of product and design, Mayur Kamat, has resigned amid a string of executive exits and

Andrew Tate had some advice for his love-struck fan as he claimed he gets 'thousands of love letters' every week

REDMOND, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 20, 2023--

By Suzanne McGee Bitcoin, the original crypto rebel, is racing into the heart of the financial establishment with

The European Union is weighing a plan that would require cloud providers to store all of their data

A former Apple engineer who fled to China five years ago has been charged with stealing the company’s self-driving car technology. The US Justice Department charged Weibao Wang, 35, for stealing large troves of data from Apple, including trade secrets and technology related to autonomous systems that are used to design self-driving cars. Mr Wang was charged with six counts of theft or attempted theft of trade secrets, according to a press release issued by the department. “Innovation is alive and well in Silicon Valley – indeed, throughout the Northern District of California,” said US attorney Ismail J Ramsey. “Unfortunately, there will always be some who cheat the system by stealing and profiting from the fruits of others’ labour. The Wang prosecution is but one example. We are pleased that the Disruptive Technology Task Force renews energy and focus on securing innovation for those who actually create it.” The former Apple engineer was a resident of Mountain View in California and began working with the tech giant in 2016. He had signed a confidentiality agreement for the project for which he was working on, and very few people at the company knew about it at that time. He began working as staff engineer with the US-based subsidiary of a Chinese company and was working to develop self-driving cars, the indictment said. The company was identified only as “Company One” in the indictment. Mr Wang was also accused of waiting for more than four months before telling Apple that he was resigning, after he signed a new employment agreement with “Company One”. After the last day of his employment at Apple, on 16 April 2018, Apple’s officials found in their logs that he had accessed large troves of confidential data in the final days of his stint at the tech giant. His Mountain View home was searched on 27 June 2018. Law enforcement agents discovered “large quantities of data taken from Apple prior to his departure” during the search, for which Mr Wang was present. After telling the agents that he had no plans to travel, he purchased a one-way ticket to Guangzhou, China, and boarded a flight that same night. In a press conference, Mr Ramsey said Mr Wang remained in China and he could face 10 years in jail, if extradited and convicted. This is the third incident of a former Apple employee being charged for stealing of documents for China. Two other Apple employees have previously been charged in similar cases involving theft of trade secrets, reported the BBC. Read More Elon Musk calls working from home ‘morally wrong’ How many more rapists and killers are in Met? Police force ‘institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic’ says damning report The Independent backs calls for jailed media tycoon Jimmy Lai to be released

Hurricane Lee has grown back into a Category 3 storm with 120-mile-per-hour winds about 650 miles (1,046 kilometers)

Usually the "lite" version of a product removes features (or calories), but the ASRock B650E

Google announced Tuesday that this year it would begin deleting accounts that had been inactive

Being a woman on the internet is hard. At times scary and exhausting, too. From

With yet another September iPhone event come and gone, we have officially reached the iPhone