Together with the announcement of the Retweet implementation on Twitter it seems that Twitter has started to send out Cease & Desist orders to third party developers in a try to protect its trademarks. In a weird spin of things, Mesiahlabs, developer of Retweet.com which we discussed previously, has become the victim of this because Twitter has received approval for the term tweet. Mesiab Labs’ @retweet account has effectively been suspended by Twitter. Previously the company had announced that they had no plans to ‘go after’ companies using the term ‘Tweet’.
It rests to be seen if Mesiab Labs will get the approval for the mark retweet granted because there might be a lot of objections to the application, not only from Twitter, who now seem to be in a unique position to claim the mark, but also from competitors such as Tweetmeme. Funnily enough, the whole RT concept is just another Twitter community driven and created component and it seems ironic at least if someone were able to claim the mark for a concept or term which is owned by the Community.
