A US court has barred startup Operation Bluebird from running a social network called Twitter, but let it keep the word Tweet and the bird logo. The injunction covers eight trademarks tied to X’s former brand, TechCrunch reports.
Operation Bluebird launched the project in late August at Twitter.now, complete with a bird logo, tweets and retweets. After the ruling, the site was renamed and now runs as Tweet.app.
The preliminary ruling came from district judge Colm F. Connolly. X had sought a ban on several Twitter-related trademarks at once. The court granted the motion for eight of them. It declined to do the same for the Tweet mark and the bird image.
In the judge’s view, Operation Bluebird is likely to prove that X stopped using those two marks. The company does not intend to go back to them either, Connolly wrote. The ruling is not final. The case will continue until the court settles whether X owns the disputed marks after its rebrand.
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Operation Bluebird is run by Michael Peroff and Stephen Coates, a former trademark lawyer at Twitter. More than 172,000 people requested usernames before Tweet.app went live. The company charges $20 to reserve a handle and join early testing.
Coates said X kept the word Twitter but walked away from Tweet and the bird image. Users, he added, have kept saying “tweet” long after the network changed its name.
