Disappointment for twitter!
Twitter had applied for a trademark claim for "Tweet", the popular term for the 140 character updates that Twitter is famous for. And to everyone's surprise, the claim was preliminarily rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. As for the reasons for the rejection, the Patent Office felt that several existing applications already use the phrase "Tweet" as a prefix for their various Twitter offerings - TweetDeck, TweetPhoto and the likes. If that was not all, some of these companies had already applied for such a trademark claim before Twitter itself did. Acting too late, Twitter?
As for Twitter, the co-founder Biz Stone had earlier made a blog post when they had first applied for the trademark claim. He said, "We have applied to trademark Tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective but we have no intention of 'going after' the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter,"
If that wasn't clear enough, he added the following, "In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet. However, if we come across a confusing or damaging project, the recourse to act responsibly to protect both users and our brand is important."
As of now, we do not have any information if Twitter has any intentions to take this up with a higher authority.
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bottom line is I don't think its a good move by twitter because 'tweet' cannot be used as trademark since there are many words starts from tweet like tweety!! Anyways it is a habit of many companies to use some word as trademark if that word becomes famous!
Aug 23, 2009
'Tweet' isn't Twitter Trademark
