— Jessica Gutierrez Alm, Attorney
Twitter, the social media giant, is being sued by its internet cousin, TWiT. TWiT, which initially stood for This Week in Tech, is a netcast network providing audio and video tech-related content. TWiT owns the registered service mark TWIT for visual and audio entertainment performances.
According to the Complaint, TWiT founder Leo Laporte and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams had some discussions about the similar brand names in the mid-2000s. The Complaint is available on Scribd, courtesy of TechCrunch. In 2007, Laporte invited Williams on TWiT’s net@night show to promote Wiliams’s new company, Twitter. Laporte alleges that although the two founders recognized their companies’ similar sounding names, at the time, they provided entirely different platforms—Twitter was text-based microblogging, and TWiT was video and audio streaming and downloading. The two founders apparently agreed informally that their companies would continue to coexist on their respective platforms.
Now, after ten years and still no formal agreement, Twitter is planning to launch original video streaming content.
Last year, TWiT sent a letter demanding that Twitter abandon its planned expansion into video content. The parties’ subsequent attempts to resolve the dispute without legal action apparently have not been successful.
TWiT alleges twelve causes of action in total, including infringement of the TWIT mark.
Perhaps the moral of this story is: put it in writing (preferably more than 140 characters). Presumably in Twitter’s early days, no one could have foreseen the future success of the social media platform and an eventual expansion into video content. But maybe TWiT should have sought something more than a handshake coexistence agreement. What do you think?