Intellectual property rights don’t dissolve the moment you stop paying attention to them. That’s the thread running through several developments last week, and it’s worth more attention than most companies give it, because the moment you decide to stop using a mark, retire a product line, or settle a patent fight is precisely the moment your IP position is being tested – whether you notice or not.

Start with Twitter. A Virginia startup called Operation Bluebird has launched Twitter.now, reviving the old blue bird branding under the argument that X Corp abandoned the Twitter and Tweet trademarks when it rebranded in 2023. X disagrees, and is suing in Delaware federal court. What makes this more than a curiosity is a Delaware judge’s comment from the bench earlier this year that X “appears to have abandoned” its rights in Tweet and the bird logo, and possibly the word Twitter itself. No written order has issued, and the case is unresolved. But the lesson doesn’t wait for a verdict: trademark rights are use-based, not sentiment-based. If your business retires a name, a logo, or an old product line, someone else can start building a case that you gave it up – and “we didn’t mean to” is not a defence courts take seriously. Decide deliberately whether you’re keeping a mark alive, and keep evidence of continued use if you are.

Second, Huawei and HP have signed a multiyear global patent cross-licensing deal covering Wi-Fi technology, including the new Wi-Fi 7 standard. This resolves a dispute that started in 2025 when Huawei sued HP over Wi-Fi 6 patents at the Unified Patent Court. Nobody walked away from anything here – HP is paying for continued access, and both sides now hold reciprocal rights to each other’s portfolios. It’s a clean example of patent litigation doing exactly the job it’s designed for: turning an infringement standoff into a priced, ongoing commercial relationship. If your products touch standardised technology, you are already inside someone else’s licensing model, whether you’ve mapped it or not. The interesting move is asking, before a dispute forces the question, whose patents you’re already relying on and what a licence would cost if they came knocking first.

Third, the EUIPO’s Board of Appeal has confirmed that a well-known brand can defeat a copycat purely on reputation, without the earlier mark even needing to cover the same goods. Rovio successfully cancelled a gambling-industry trade mark that echoed Angry Birds’ colour scheme, character design and “crashing birds” concept, on the basis that the applicant’s dishonest intent could be inferred from the strength of Rovio’s reputation alone. This is a materially easier enforcement path than most brand owners realise exists: you don’t need a matching registration if your reputation does the work instead. It also means the return on building genuine brand recognition compounds in ways beyond marketing – it becomes a legal asset in its own right.

The pattern across all three: IP rights are shaped by what you actually do, documented and provable, not by what you intended. X Corp’s intentions about Twitter don’t matter if its conduct reads as abandonment. Huawei’s and HP’s dispute didn’t need to end in court once both sides priced the alternative. Rovio’s decades of visible brand-building is now doing enforcement work that no registration alone could achieve.

None of this is really about trademarks or patents specifically – it’s about whether your IP strategy is a record of decisions you actually made, or a set of assumptions nobody has tested. The three questions worth asking this week:

(1) What have we stopped using that we haven’t formally decided to abandon?

(2) Whose technology are we relying on without a licence? and

(3) Is our own reputation strong enough to do enforcement work if a registration alone won’t cut it?

Related reading: Why IP Strategies Fail: The Gap Between the Decision and the Portfolio, The $60,000 Business Name: Why an ASIC Search Is Not a Trade Mark Search and Who Gets Paid for the Platform? Lessons From a Big Week in AI and Intellectual Property.

Sources for this post

1. Twitter.now / X Corp v Operation Bluebird – TechCrunch, 27 August 2026; primary docket at CourtListener, X Corp. v. Operation Bluebird, Inc., 1:25-cv-01510.
2. Huawei/HP Wi-Fi patent cross-licence – Huawei press release, 26 August 2026; South China Morning Post commentary.
3. EUIPO Angry Birds bad faith decision – EUIPO Board of Appeal decision R1791/2025-4; The IPKat, 27 August 2026.