Company all a-Twitter over social site's trademark

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The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected Twitter's application to trademark 'tweet' again.

It's the agony of da tweet!

Mega-hot micro-blogging service Twitter tried and failed yet again to trademark the term "tweet," thwarted by a third-party developer that uses its site and beat it to the punch.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected Twitter's trademark application on Dec. 22 of last year, saying that "tweet" was too similar to the already-registered phrase "Let Your Ad Meet Tweets," which belongs to the Des Moines-based advertising service Twittad.

An application Twitter filed for "tweet" in 2009 was met with a preliminary denial in August of that year, with the trademark office citing several applications for "tweet"-related trademarks that had been filed before Twitter's.

In its latest rejection of Twitter's trademark application, the trademark office cited rules against the "registration of an applied-for mark that so resembles a registered mark that it is likely that a potential consumer would be confused or mistaken or deceived as to the source of the goods and/or services."

The office found that "tweet" was "similar" to "Let Your Ad Meet Tweets" in "sound, appearance and connotation." More specifically, "the marks both contain the term TWEET, which is identical in sound, appearance and meaning."

The trademark office, needless to say, does not adhere to Twitter's 140-character enforced pithiness.

Twitter is approaching its fifth anniversary: Co-founder Jack Dorsey published the world's first tweet on March 21, 2006.

In the time since, it's become big business. Twittad is a service that matches Twitter users with advertisers to sell space on their profiles based on the number of followers they have.

Twittad founder James Eliason said his company had heard from Twitter, but that it hadn't offered to acquire the trademark. Instead, according to Eliason, Twitter expressed "concern" over the trademark and "wanted us to assign our trademark to them."
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Eliason said that the dates speak for themselves and calls the dispute "a timeline issue."

"We firmly stand by our position of the legitimacy of the trademark due to the fact that our mark was cleared by the Trademark office in 2008," he wrote in an email.

He said his company acquired the rights "well before the word 'Tweet' became widely used in the Twitter ecosystem."

He did add that if Twitter believes "tweet" is important intellectual property for its business to own, Twittad would be willing to consider a deal.

Twitter did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Contact Gatecrasher:
Frank DiGiacomo: fdigiacomo@nydailynews.com
Carson Griffith: cgriffith@nydailynews.com
Molly Fischer: mfischer@nydailynews.com

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