Saturday, August 22, 2009

'Tweet' isn'tTwitter Trademark [United States]

As it turns out, 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?


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