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Scampie
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arborelia
@arborelia

Who owns this 𝕏?

I've seen it said a few times that Elon's "𝕏" logo is "just a Unicode character", but that's not the end of the story, because Unicode isn't just a bunch of platonic forms that came from nowhere.

In this case, unmodified from what? There isn't one default Unicode font. Unicode renders their charts to PDF using a few proprietary fonts, and for example they have to show CJK characters in several different fonts because they can look different in Chinese hanzi, Japanese kanji, or Korean hanja. Some characters can't be found in any publicly available font.

This example on compart.com is rendered in the Adobe Source Sans Pro font, created by Paul D. Hunt. So I believe Paul D. Hunt is the one who drew the double-struck X in those particular proportions.

Remarkably for an Adobe product, Source Sans Pro is open source, under the Open Font License. Anyone can use it. But that doesn't mean it's public domain for anyone to say "I made this".

As a geometrically simple character that fonts have no particular reason to stylize, it probably looks extremely similar in other fonts, so it may be hard to tell exactly which font they used over at the site formerly known as Twitter. But it is possible that Adobe owns Elon's logo.

Followups:

  • The comments contain some nuance about how this doesn't really affect its use as a trademark
  • A font sleuth on the X site identified the font that it more likely came from, owned by Monotype, not Adobe
  • They changed the proportions of the X by now
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in reply to @srxl's post:

in reply to @apocryphalmess's post:

in reply to @arborelia's post:

fizbin
@fizbin

Eh...

So as a matter of copyright, Adobe may own the logo; though if it does, Twitter (as with anyone) may use it under the terms of the Open Font License.

As a trademark though, Adobe almost certainly does not own it unless they've been marketing something as “𝕏” all this time and I've just missed it. It is perfectly possible to trademark an arbitrary non-empty sequence of Unicode code points, even a single one, and to attach a trademark to some particular visual representation of that sequence. (Or at least to make the attempt; what kills trademarks is generally not authorship or lack of originality in the way that can kill copyrights or patents but prior existing use: trying to trademark some word or phrase everyone already uses to refer to not-your-product won't generally work)

Whether Elon owns the logo effectively as a matter of trademark likely depends on whether he is paying his lawyers this month, a subject on which I will take no bets.

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arborelia
@arborelia

yeah these are good points; the "ownership" I was talking about was vague and it was about the copyright of who created the glyph (which a font sleuth has identified to be more likely to be Monotype), but what matters for branding is trademark, and it's definitely important to remember those are two different things.

and the prior use would be mathematicians, theoretically, but mathematicians don't really use this particular double-struck letter

but still, the dude saying "I made this logo" kinda shouldn't get to say that, right?

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