OpenAI – Application for US trademark “GPT” has failed

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn97733259&docId=FREF20240206125856&linkId=1#docIndex=0&page=1

by vincent_s • 2 years ago

602 258 2 years ago

tsdr.uspto.gov

Great. I hope they find a real name to their product, that would not be an acronym.

We can critic Google as much as we want, but at least it's a bit less weird to say "Hey Gemini" compared to "Hey GPT", when you know that GPT is actually something between an abstract concept and a code implementation.

HPsquared2• 2 years ago

In principle an acronym (initialism really) can be an original name, e.g. IBM, BMW. This is common. This trademark seems to have been denied because it's not "original" enough. It's too generic a term.

block_dagger• 2 years ago

Company name vs product name

littlestymaar5• 2 years ago

It's not so much that it's too generic, but that the term has been broadly used by pretty much everyone talking about transformer-based models for the past years at this point. The term has entered public domain before they even tried to register it.

tgv• 2 years ago

Weirdly enough, Microsoft did get a trademark on "Windows". Perhaps OpenAI was counting on a similar decision.

keiferski• 2 years ago

The real question is whether beemer is trademarked.

vrighter• 2 years ago

to play devil's advocate for a second...

referring to gpt as "hey gpt" is not really different than "computer" as used in at least one popular tv show.

neya• 2 years ago

Thankfully, finally some faith in the patent system. This was an asshole move to harass others from using the word GPT in their trade. Kind of like how Instagram did it with the word "gram".

yau8edq12i3• 2 years ago

Trademarks are completely unrelated to patents.

eru9• 2 years ago

Or they should be. I think in the US they are handled by the same bureaucracy called 'United States Patent and Trademark Office'?

sanxiyn• 2 years ago

Well, yes, but in the US USPTO is responsible for both trademarks and patents.

littlestymaar5• 2 years ago

They are different but not completely unrelated either. They are both parts of industrial property.

vmfunction• 2 years ago

yeah, but in US, both are in the same office: USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office)

jug• 2 years ago

Good. It's like a company in biomedicine trying to trademark "RNA". I dislike how OpenAI are trying to hijack a term to describe a kind of language model for their products and cringed when they introduced "GPTs" and "Making your own GPT". I see what you're trying to do, OpenAI...

So, after a quick glance here -- OpenAI argued that a consumer may not realize this and what GPT means, trying to use this as a defense for hijacking the term for use in their product portfolio, but the attorney thankfully didn't find the argument very convincing due to vast and established Internet evidence. He also pointed out that it doesn't even matter if a user doesn't know specifically what the acronym "GPT" exactly means, and that it's enough that the general connection to AI and Q&A technology has already been established.

larodi• 2 years ago

Next they try to copyright CHAT perhaps. Indeed very irritating.

EGreg2• 2 years ago

How did Microsoft trademark Windows? When computer windows existed?

jacobsimon2• 2 years ago

I thought OpenAI was the first to develop and use the term GPT[1]. So maybe a more apt comparison than RNA would be PCR, which was a technique developed in a private lab and patented, even though it was published in scientific journals etc.

1. https://cdn.openai.com/research-covers/language-unsupervised...

blagie7• 2 years ago

Doesn't matter either way who invented it. This is trademark, not patent.

If they wanted a trademark, that needed to appear on copy from day 0. The paper is titled: "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training" and not "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training (TM)"

They ALSO would have needed to use a different generic term to refer to the technique. For example, Velcro always says things like "Velcro-brand hook-and-loop," and ALWAYS uses a generic term to refer to hook-and-loop when talking across brands. It ONLY uses "Velcro(tm)" to talk about their product specifically. OpenAI started using GPT generically.

Publications like this one, if anything, undermine OpenAI's case since they're using the term generically.

The decision is correct. Trademark law is used precisely to prevent this sort of thing: OpenAI can have a generic term or a trademark. The law is set up precisely to prevent a company from building their brand value by retroactively trademarking a generic term once relying on a community to get it established.

To be more blunt: I use "GPT" generically because they encouraged me to do so. That should not contribute brand value to OpenAI GPT-3 or OpenAI GPT-4.

nicklecompte3• 2 years ago

RNA, PCR, and GPT all have precisely the same problem: the acronyms are purely technical.

- ribonucleic acid

- polymerase chain reaction

- generative pretrained transformer

You can't trademark the phrase "polymerase chain reaction" because there are many types of polymerase chain reactions, not just the ones used for copying DNA. [ETA: specifically I mean "copying DNA at commercial scale" i.e. the patented biochemical engineering techniques.] Likewise a generative neural network using pre-training with a transformer architecture is simply too generic to trademark "generative pretrained transformer." And if you can't trademark the phrase you can't trademark the acronym.

bhickey2• 2 years ago

The term 'GPT' was first used in the BERT paper to refer to Generic Pre-trained Transformers. [0]

The fine-tuning approach, such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (OpenAI GPT) (Radford et al., 2018), introduces minimal task-specific parameters, and is trained on the downstream tasks by simply fine-tuning all pre-trained parameters.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805

lolinder4• 2 years ago

That paper is using a pre-existing term "Generative Pretraining" [0] and applying it to Transformers (a Google innovation [1]). As far as I can see from a search, they don't even use the term GPT or Generative Pretrained Transformers in that paper, and they don't in the accompanying blog post either [2]. A sibling [3] claims that the BERT paper in Oct 2018 was the first to use the term GPT to describe what OpenAI built, and that sounds reasonable since a cursory look through the Sep 2018 archive of openai.com turns up nothing.

[0] See this 2012 example: http://cs224d.stanford.edu/papers/maas_paper.pdf

[1] https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2017/file/3f5ee243547de...

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20180923011305/https://blog.opena...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39381802

kurthr• 2 years ago

Yeah, but my 2 year old Generative Potty-Trained Transformer needs an acronym too!

Seriously, like TLA domain names and other TLA acronyms, there just aren't enough to allow trademark. Imagine, if 5 letter LASER had been trademarked? Would that have also covered LASIK (Laser assisted sub-epithelial keratectomy)?

singularity2001• 2 years ago

Good. Now they are forced to finally give it a proper name.

war321• 2 years ago

Yeah, ChatGPT is such a clinical name for a consumer facing app. Especially considering how easy AI stuff is to anthropomorphize. Google had the right idea with Bard and Gemini.

sailingparrot• 2 years ago

OpenAI came up with the term Generative Pre-Training with the paper introducing what is now called GPT-1. Not arguing that they should own a trademark for it but saying they are “hijacking” the term is disingenuous.

HarHarVeryFunny2• 2 years ago

It's a pretty dumb acronym though since it's doubly redundant.

The "T" is the only descriptive bit. The transformer is inherently a generative architecture - a sequence predictor/generator, so "generative" adds nothing to the description. All current neural net models are trained before use, so "pretrained" adds nothing either.

It's like calling a car an MPC - a mobile pre-assembled car.

lolinder4• 2 years ago

No, they took a pre-existing term "Generative Pretraining"[0] and applied it to Transformers (a Google innovation [1]) to get Generative Pretrained Transformers [2]. Even if you looked at the full name, that paper doesn't use GPT or Generative Pretrained Transformers at all from what I can tell, this commenter [3] claims that the name was first used in the BERT paper.

[0] See this 2012 example: http://cs224d.stanford.edu/papers/maas_paper.pdf

[1] https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2017/file/3f5ee243547de...

[2] https://cdn.openai.com/research-covers/language-unsupervised...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39381802

udev40962• 2 years ago

Shilling for a multi billion dollar corporation makes you look like a fool and even more so when clearly they are on the wrong side of the argument here

lupire2• 2 years ago

Descriptive terms cannot be trademarks, for obvious reasons. Corporations are not permitted to own the English language.

https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/strong-trademarks

Dalewyn• 2 years ago

He also pointed out that it doesn't even matter if a user doesn't know specifically what the acronym "GPT" exactly means, and that it's enough that the general connection to AI and Q&A technology has already been established.

Maybe I'm just an ancient wreck of a computer nerd, but my first understanding of GPT was "Grand Partition Table" as a GNU joke/meme/misunderstanding for "GUID Partition Table", and to this day I can not redefine or re-remember it to whatever the hell OpenAI wants it to mean.

lupire2• 2 years ago

No one knows what word the T in Mr T stands for, but everyone knows who it stands for.

ijhuygft7762• 2 years ago

Twitter went the extreme way... they hijacked a letter... Alphabet is not much better.

_chu12• 2 years ago

As much as I don't really have an issue with what Musk did to Twitter mainly because I don't use it, X is a shitty name. Could've made a cool new name like Phaser or XLog or something.

fennecfoxy• 2 years ago

I mean, I would have accepted if Google or the original researchers involved wanted to trademark it, since they paid for/did all the work.

But OAI has nothing to do with "attention is all you need".

manojlds• 2 years ago

Noob question - how is someone able to trademark Apple but not GPT?

HPsquared2• 2 years ago

This case would be like an apple company selling apples trying to trademark the word "apple".

eru9• 2 years ago

See also Apple (the music company) vs Apple Computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

threeseed• 2 years ago

Trademarks are localised to specific industries.

So I can apply for a trademark for Apple Cleaners or Apple Tax Accountant just not Apple Computers.

yard2010• 2 years ago

....good luck with that!

eru9• 2 years ago

Yes, you can try that. Though keep in mind that the well-known Apple can afford a lot of expensive lawyers.

nicklecompte3• 2 years ago

Registration is refused because the applied-for mark merely describes a feature, function, or characteristic of applicant’s goods and services.

Apple is a brand name that contains no technical information, whereas GPT is a technical term describing what the software does. OpenAI cannot patent transformers or generative pretraining, so it makes no sense for them to be able to trademark "generative pre-trained transformer."

So a better analogy would be Apple trying to trademark Screen Time so that no other smartphone OS could name its usage-tracking feature "Screen Time" - you can't trademark a description of what the software does.

amelius2• 2 years ago

That's the technical explanation.

It doesn't explain why society thinks this is an effective and fair set of rules.

ben_w5• 2 years ago

"App Store" would be my example, as they had a legal fight over that, initially getting the trademark then not being able to prevent Amazon using "Amazon Appstore".

input_sh• 2 years ago

Because trademarks apply to specific sectors, not everything. You can't make a computer and call your brand Apple. You can make Apple Bottoms jeans, and because the two are operating in completely separate industries, customers don't get confused.

But GPT is already generate enough in its sector, so...

dontupvoteme3• 2 years ago

Here's a dumb question - If the sent date is Feb06, why are we hearing of this slightly over a week later?

bagels• 2 years ago

It wasn't put on the website till now, or nobody saw it till now, or nobody posted it here till now?

unreal37• 2 years ago

What was your expectation? Would it be slower for the government to update its website with email correspondence? Or faster?

A week seems... normal.

dontupvoteme3• 2 years ago

I thought it would be a top story is all.

klausa• 2 years ago

It was posted on HN sooner, just didn't get traction.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

dontupvoteme3• 2 years ago

Ah, the danger of single sourcing. Thanks

pwdisswordfishc• 2 years ago

UEFI Forum exhaled in relief.

IceHegel• 2 years ago

The typesetting is giving me a headache wish they had used latex.

olalonde3• 2 years ago

I don't understand why they thought it was a good idea to use an obscure academic acronym for customer facing products. I guess they didn't expect their "API demo" to blow up the way it did and are now stuck with the name.

imiric2• 2 years ago

ChatGPT is not really a customer facing product. It's a crude interface over an LLM, directed more towards developers and tech enthusiasts who will use it to create customer facing products, rather than towards the general public. It only exploded in popularity because of its novelty, but it's far from being generally accessible or useful.

pooper• 2 years ago

ChatGPT is still the only (free of cost? haven't tried anything paid) chat assistant things that allow me to have a conversation in that I push a button and then it keeps listening. I say something it replies and goes back to listening mode without me having to press a button.

mousetree• 2 years ago

My grandmother uses ChatGPT

hparadiz• 2 years ago

I've been generating images with stable diffusion in the hopes of creating a snowboard design using my own personal computer and the results so far are actually incredible. And we're still in early days.

Setting up a text only LLM is just as trivial. And frankly better cause you can train it for yourself and tag out a model and save it.

hawski• 2 years ago

People I don't find technical in my circle used it before me and still use it. In my circle it was more correlated to younger age - early 20s, than to technical ability.

olalonde3• 2 years ago

I know that was the initial plan, hence why I referred to it as an "API demo", but they now reportedly have hundreds of million active users.

edwinjm• 2 years ago

Haha. It has always been targeted towards consumers. They even removed the `temperature` setting.

cqqxo4zV46cp5• 2 years ago

Countless non-techies at my work use ChatGPT. Several members of my family use ChatGPT, most of them haven’t done as much as write an Excel formula. My partner and her friends all use ChatGPT, none of them techies. South Park literally had an episode (over a year ago?) where the entire plot was about using ChatGPT to cheat at both performing in AND marking assessments, as well as responding to needy romantic partners. You are completely, incomprehensibly incorrect.

michaelt• 2 years ago

Isn't "Generative Pre-Trained Transformer" an obscure acronym that openai came up with though?

I know openai didn't invent the transformer, but "Attention Is All You Need" is about translation, they don't mention the word "generative"

quonn• 2 years ago

But that class of models has been known as generative for years even before the attention paper.

bhickey2• 2 years ago

Isn't "Generative Pre-Trained Transformer" an obscure acronym that openai came up with though?

Nope, they didn't coin the acronym. First appearance of OpenAI GPT was in the BERT paper by Devlin et al. 2018.

littlestymaar5• 2 years ago

Yep, and had they applied for a trademark back then, it would very likely have been granted.

Like Apple didn't wait the iPhone 4 to trademark the iPhone brand…

But now the term has been used colloquially for years, so it's out of reach of trademark protect at this point.

yau8edq12i3• 2 years ago

Who cares if it's an "obscure academic acronym"? Nobody cares. "Laser" is an "obscure academic acronym", it didn't prevent it from catching on. In ChatGPT's case, you should ask around - people remember the name just fine.

olalonde3• 2 years ago

Unlike laser, it's difficult to pronounce and remember.

jcparkyn• 2 years ago

people remember the name just fine.

What about all the people who mistakenly call it ChatGTP? (and yes I have heard this more than once in real life). I assume this is also the origin of the HN user with the same name.

dudeinjapan• 2 years ago

Phew! My Gay Panda Therapy business is safe… for now.

1f60c• 2 years ago

As someone who is both a paid customer of ChatGPT Plus and the API (in other words, a loyal customer), I'm glad to see this.

While companies can and should do better than name everything CompanyGPT, this sends a clear message that OpenAI doesn't own the concept of GPTs, even if it's a meaningless string of letters to most people.

3cats-in-a-coat• 2 years ago

Good because GPT was a terrible brand. I don’t mean as in “oh no they use a term”. I mean as in its a very obscure term for most. There are way better names to come up with. And “GPTs” is even worse as a way to express “customizable prompts and knowledge files”.

whatsthatabout• 2 years ago

It's really honorable that OpenAI keeps their promise of bringing open-source AI to the people! /s

cientifico• 2 years ago

I find it surprising how quickly we rush to pass judgment on OpenAI's actions without understanding the motivations behind their attempt to trademark. It's possible that they are seeking protection against others who might register the same, or it could be a measure to prevent customers from unknowingly sharing sensitive company data with a GPT indexer unrelated to OpenAI. If anyone has evidence of OpenAI acting in bad faith, please share it.

matsemann• 2 years ago

If they're worried about people confusing their service with others, shouldn't they then just choose a different name than the tech it's built on? I don't see MySQL or others being afraid of them being confused with other databases.

rerdavies2• 2 years ago

MyGPT is almost definitely trademarkable. (Although MySQL might sue).

buildfocus• 2 years ago

I don't think the debate here is about motivation - the concern is that in itself, regardless of the reasons, attempting to trademark a generic technical term is bad behaviour.

stavros2• 2 years ago

I have evidence of them acting in bad faith: They're trying to trademark a generic term.

rightbyte• 2 years ago

This "they have to do bad thing or someone else might" excuse is not working out anymore for me.

scaryclam• 2 years ago

Given how they characterise GPTs in general as custom versions of chatGPT (https://openai.com/blog/introducing-gpts), I don't think it's a stretch to assume they're not being very benevolent in this trademark attempt. You should also be asking for evidence that they are acting in good faith, if you're interested in determining their actual motivations.

DeathArrow• 2 years ago

Let's trademark all words in dictionary and all 3 letters combinations.

rerdavies2• 2 years ago

No need to trademark all 3 letter combinations, because all three letter acronyms have already been purchased by DNS squatters. It would be crazy to choose a name for a company or product for which you can't get the domain name.

seydor2• 2 years ago

Good they need to find a better name anyway. Also how about changing their own name to closedAI

_giorgio_4• 2 years ago

Please remember that Sam uses only lowercase letters. So it needs to be one word only, or use "-_", like closed_ai, really-closed-ai, agi-and-i

matwood3• 2 years ago

_ would lose the efficiencies gained by avoiding the shift key so only - can be used

jeanlucas• 2 years ago

AGI and I lol

firtoz• 2 years ago

I and I don't approve this

cqqxo4zV46cp5• 2 years ago

Generic tangents are against the rules.

gorjusborg2• 2 years ago

I think CashAI should also be considered.

seydor2• 2 years ago

I believe they accept credit cards

lagt_t• 2 years ago

Rare patent office win

brikym• 2 years ago

I guess they have to settle for plan B: Chad Gipitty

_giorgio_4• 2 years ago

The primary issue is that the OpenAI name lacks appeal.

Moreover, it harbors a cringe-worthy idiosyncrasy, given that there's nothing 'open' about OpenAI.

cqqxo4zV46cp5• 2 years ago

I guarantee you that over 99% of OpenAI’s paying user base do not give a hoot about this “open AI” thing. It literally doesn’t matter outside of people whining on Hacker News and Twitter. I’d eat my hat if it was the deciding factor for ONE person choosing whether or not to use an OpenAI product. If this is a big issue for you, you’re probably opposed to closed-source models in general.

Open sounds like a fancy computer word, and AI is….literally AI, two letters people are very excited about. I very much doubt that OpenAI has a branding problem.

_giorgio_4• 2 years ago

It sounds like a meme name the moment you know how OpenAI started.

I use and pay for their products and I find them absolutely great. I'm obviously opposed to closed source models and knowledge for AI because I've seen how important was the GPT paper by Google. You're making judgments and assumptions and that is quite annoying.

kyleyeats• 2 years ago

Can they get "grok" and "meta" back too? I really miss new words.

zogrodea2• 2 years ago

GPT had previously been used as an acronym for market-research websites like Amazon MTurk (participants Get Paid To fill surverys) before the LLM craze so it does seem like a bad trademark.

mijoharas• 2 years ago

I believe trademarks are usually scoped to a specific usecase, so it's possible that wouldn't be infringing if the trademark were granted.

zogrodea2• 2 years ago

I didn't know that. Thanks for the information.

I think Apple's trademark lawsuit against a.pl (Polish grocery site) [0] failed for that reason, so it seems good that the concept looks like it's limited to specific fields.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/461258/apple_vs_a_pl_tech_co...

LoveMortuus• 2 years ago

There are so many example of trademark abuse... Like Monster Energy SLAPPing anyone who uses the word Monster [0: search for 'monster energy sues', there's too many to pick a single one]. Or King trying to SLAPP The Banner Saga for using the word Saga [1]. Or Bethesda SLAPPing Mojang for "Scrolls" [2].

I'm probably missing a ton more of these, but to be fair, it is quite easy to mistake these with copyrights issues, because it's usually the same companies that abuse that system as well.

I'm not certain if these are SLAPP, but I do like the sound of the acronym. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/slapp_suit]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/01/23/candy-crush...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/16/bethesda-a...

blackshaw• 2 years ago

Entrepreneur magazine are famous for this too.

jtbayly• 2 years ago

Or Monster Cables...

alephaleph• 2 years ago

The defining feature of a SLAPP is that it is a means of shutting up critics — not just any frivolous lawsuit is a SLAPP.

armcat• 2 years ago

I went a bit meta on this and supplied the trademark report to ChatGPT, prompting it to summarize. It did so as follows:

The US Trademark Office rejected the application, deeming "GPT" merely descriptive of the features, functions, or characteristics of OpenAI's goods and services. The decision was based on extensive evidence showing "GPT" is widely used in the industry to refer to a specific type of AI technology, making it not distinctive enough for trademark protection under the Trademark Act Section 2(e)(1). Additionally, OpenAI's application was partially refused for Class 09 due to unacceptable specimens, as they did not demonstrate the mark's use in commerce in a manner that allows for the downloading or purchasing of the software.

Also: I understand the trademark decision but does OpenAI have any patents on GPT? Google has for example patented word2vec, https://patents.google.com/patent/US9037464B1/en

tolleydbg• 2 years ago

I don't keep up with the AI space at all, but have they become victims of trademark confusion, a la Kleenex?

lolinder4• 2 years ago

No, the primary reason given for rejection is that the term is merely descriptive—GPT just refers to a transformer that was trained with generative pre-training. The examining attorney gave a bunch of examples of GPT being used to describe a type of AI system.

So it's not that the trademark has been diluted (although the attorney included a warning that even if the trademarks weren't descriptive it's also become generic), the problem is that it would never have been an acceptable trademark because trademark law doesn't allow you to trademark a description of a product that would apply equally well to your competitors' products.

visarga• 2 years ago

Wondering what's the plan when they transition to Mamba or state space models. Still call them GPT, but without the T? GP*

roydivision• 2 years ago

Definition of GTP - Generative pre-trained transformer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transfo...

joemckenna• 2 years ago

Leading up to ChatGPT, virtually no model innovation was needed. Just some minor tweaks to activation functions and the order in which operations were completed in the feedfoward layers. So they were essentially trying to trademark the innovation published openly in Attention is All You Need?

JCM9• 2 years ago

This was an open and shut case and OpenAI was either delusional or just being arrogant in thinking they would get this trademark. The PTO is simply applying the law. You can’t trademark something in common use like this.

shagie• 2 years ago

Consider the mess if they didn't attempt to get it, and a trademark troll (yes, they do exist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_troll ) was able to get the trademark and sued everyone.

Should OpenAI get a trademark for GPT? No. Should anyone else? No. How do you prevent someone else from trying to get the trademark for GPT? Try to get it yourself if you've got a word used with a product name.

At worst following this, you get denied - like OpenAI was for GPT. But this is better than the worst worst case where you don't try and someone else gets it and sues you for trademark infringement (and wins? forces you to rebrand?).

DonHopkins2• 2 years ago

Now do GOFAI "Frame"!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence...

AlphaJack• 2 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

gorjusborg2• 2 years ago

Now that's a GPT to remember.

xyst• 2 years ago

I guess OpenAI lawyers don’t have the same connections at Meta lawyers as USPTO

tartrate• 2 years ago

They've come a long way from being open to claiming exclusive rights to use a scientific term. Wow.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

[dupe]

Bit more discussion last week, probably should have updated the URL:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39322046

_chu12• 2 years ago

That would literally be the same as Microsoft trying to trademark the "-soft" suffix. Can't wait for OpenAI to make more wacky decisions over time.

usrusr• 2 years ago

I'd say it's somewhere between the -soft hypothetical and landgrabs like T-anything that have been tried in reality.

Of course the real question we all want to see answered is did they dogfood the trademark application documents?

m3kw9• 2 years ago

Good, it was an az move

canjobear2• 2 years ago

This seems reasonable because GPT has already been used to name models that were not developed by OpenAI, like GPT-J and GPT-Neo.

danielbln• 2 years ago

GPT-2 predates GPT-J as well as GPT-Neo.

canjobear2• 2 years ago

It doesn’t matter. OpenAI took no action to prevent Eleuther from using the name GPT, which shows it wasn’t intended as a trademark.

0xPMW• 2 years ago

I was rejected by the App Store a few months ago because I named my app {AppName}GPT for use of a "registered" trademark. I got through their review process with my first few versions, but on my third update they rejected. Ultimately, I decided on a name change and it's yielded better results for ASO anyways.

amelius2• 2 years ago

Unrelated but is "App Store" actually trademarked?

matchagaucho• 2 years ago

Those claims are quite a land grab.

If on appeal they focused solely on their "Explore GPTs" store, I wonder if the USPTO would be more lenient?

rkagerer• 2 years ago

Why the word "failed" instead of "refused" (or "rejected")?

udev40962• 2 years ago

Looks a lot less embarrassing right?

4b11b4• 2 years ago

I mean the first two words are general purpose...

simple10• 2 years ago

This is good the trademark failed. It might have been more of a defensive move rather than trying to lock up the term for OpenAI's exclusive use. Although, I'm sure they would have been happy if it succeeded.

Question for a lawyer, but in my experience it's common for companies to file trademarks with the expectation they'll lose. This creates a precedence for others trying to file similar trademarks and clears the way for the company to continue using the non-trademarked term without fear of future lawsuit.

OpenAI – Application for US trademark “GPT” has failed

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