Policy & Regulation
Judge blocks X rival from "Twitter" name, allows "Tweet" for now
A federal court in Delaware barred startup Operation Bluebird from using the "Twitter" name, but found X had likely abandoned the "Tweet" mark and bird logo, letting the startup relaunch as Tweet.app.
Operation Bluebird, a Virginia-based startup, originally launched under the name Twitter.now, but the court barred it from using that name, siding with X on the core “Twitter” trademark. The court also found that X had likely abandoned two other related trademarks — the word “tweet” and the Twitter bird logo — making them available to use. Operation Bluebird has since rebranded its website as Tweet.app, using the freed-up “tweet” name, and launched to the public.
The startup’s founders are two lawyers: Illinois-based Michael Peroff and Stephen Coates, previously a trademark lawyer at Twitter. The company’s homepage states its purpose is to reclaim what Elon Musk abandoned when he renamed the platform X, saying he “threw the bird away on his way out.” Tweet.app told TechCrunch that more than 172,000 people requested a handle on the site before launch, and the startup charges users $20 to reserve a handle and join, which likely helps cover its legal costs.
The ruling itself is not final. U.S. District Court Judge Colm F. Connolly issued a split decision on X’s request for a preliminary injunction against Operation Bluebird’s use of a series of Twitter trademarks the startup says X had abandoned since its rebrand. The judge granted X’s motion regarding eight Twitter-related marks but denied it for the Tweet mark and the Twitter bird logo, writing that Bluebird was “likely to succeed in proving both that X Corp. discontinued the bona fide use of the Tweet mark and Bird logo and that it intends not to resume the use of the marks.” The case will proceed to determine whether X ultimately retains rights to any of the Twitter marks.
“They kept the word. They let go of the bird, and they let go of the tweet,” Coates wrote in an announcement about the rebrand shared via email with TechCrunch. “A tweet was never a corporation. It’s one person saying something. That word survived three years of a company trying to replace it, because the public declined to stop using it. We think that tells you who it belongs to.”
Why it matters
The ruling shows that abandoning a trademark during a rebrand carries real legal risk — a company that walks away from a name and logo, even informally, can lose the ability to stop others from using it.