OpenAI loses trademark dispute at EU court(dpa-international.com) |
OpenAI loses trademark dispute at EU court(dpa-international.com) |
> for certain software and information technology goods and services, the term is purely descriptive and therefore lacks the distinctiveness required for trademark protection
edit: add the latter statement
On other hand RedAI or BlueAI might very well pass. It is not entirely unreasonable decision if you consider if the terms would be used in regular conversations on AI.
Furthermore they have not said anything about [adjective] being non trademarkable, they have said that you shouldn't be able to trademark things that have specific meaning in your industry, as Open has some specific meaning in the software industry.
Thus you would probably be allowed to name your things [big] +[proudct/service provided] or in this case bigAI because big does not really imply a specific desirable quality in the Software industry.
Now before you start talking of how you can see blah blah how big would be useful blah blah, as is the tradition whenever programmers encounter a legal decision that they do not agree with, it just ain't gonna work. I guess though I cannot prevent the inevitable, but nobody in IT says does it have the technical quality of "bigness" before purchasing, but they do about the quality of "Openness", so obviously some adjectives would be untrademarkable in this context, if you named your AI SecureAI probably no go, If you named your AI UglyAssAI probably fine.
Caterpillar, Apple, Kellogg, etc really don’t have anything to do with the underlying product but neither do people’s names.
(And if WinterTire Co was anything like OpenAI, it'd be focused on making summer tires)
Having gone through the process and gotten both approvals and rejections, the line is pretty clear.
The panel ruled in our favor, that their OPENSPACE trademark is probably invalid because it is descriptive.
https://domainnamewire.com/2026/04/08/u-s-defense-contractor...
Trademarks are first intended to protect consumers, so that if it says Coca Cola, then the Coca Cola company made it, for the better of for the worse, but at least you know.
OpenAI is already a well known name in Europe, and when I see OpenAI on a product, I expect it to be a product of that company. It doesn't mean I will want to use it, I may even want to avoid it, but I don't want it to be from someone else. By denying that trademark, anyone could call their product OpenAI, and I don't think that situation would benefit the consumer.
You are right that the decision has the potential to confuse consumers. However, that is on Open AI, they should have consulted trademark lawyers earlier, and should have rebranded after shifting from open AI to commercial AI.
Are there brand awareness surveys that back that up?
Huh? I thought they're intended to protect "innovation".
Trademarks don't prevent you from copying anything, they only prevent you from being misleading regarding the origin.
American Airlines for example is indeed just an American airline. The Container Store, Vision Center, General Motors, International business machines (IBM), the list goes on.
Even Microsoft is just a contraction of their original product, microcomputer software.
The only people naming something "OpenAI" are going to be trying to trick you into downloading their scammy chatGPT clone.
Ah yes, chosing a name that transports openness and transparency when the opposite is the case, and complaining about not being able to register that name as a trademark, which will cause financial harm the said company -- but somehow there's still people to spin it the other way around so it harms consumers now, therefore it was a bad decision.
That's the definition of anti-consumer behavior
What will harm consumers is the scammy "OpenAI" chat app that I can now legally upload to app stores in the EU, in hopes of tricking people into thinking it's a genuine app.
It would be more honest to their customers and better show who they are and what they stand for.
Here are the 13 valid trademarks in France containing the word "apple" in the same category as fruit: https://data.inpi.fr/search?advancedSearch=%257B%2522checkbo...
None of them are descriptive of the actual fruit.
"Apples in the Sky" is a valid trademark only because apples in the sky do not exist. If there was a strange meteorobiological event where such fruit started to grow in the clouds, this would no longer be a valid trademark for someone to create, because it would be descriptive of a category of things in the real world.
I somewhat agree with the EU here. It's far too generic, "Open" and "AI." To grant the trademark would mean any AI product that actually IS open, or open source, etc. cannot say they are "Open AI" which IMO would be a problem.
Where I might disagree with the ruling is spacing vs. no spacing. I'd have granted them the trademark on specifically "openai" as a single word but not "Open AI". Let's them defend their name against anyone else calling themselves "OpenAI" but not any other product advertising itself as "Open" "AI".
Entirely possible, seeming more likely, that I didn't have enough background information on the short article.
Any legal guesses as to why those 2 companies are treated differently with regards to the very generic words : "open", "text", "AI" ?
EDIT add another example is Open Systems that has a office in Switzerland. https://www.open-systems.com/
The trademark registrations search results: https://www.tmdn.org/tmview/#/tmview/results?page=1&pageSize...
We can assume the OpenAI lawyers brought up these and other similar examples and the court rejected the past examples as a valid argument.
I suppose that could be a generic term for any AI used as an mock adversarial or sparring-partner role, like how "red team" is today.
> BlueAI
Would refer to an LLM/agent rained to simulate clinical depression...
...at which point I would ask why we're creating things that will know only pain and suffering? Are we the baddies now?
Second, as far as I can find through the French IP office (INPI), OpenText (single word) is trademarked as a figurative trademark (meaning they are basically protecting the image of the logo), not a verbal trademark.[0]
Which is what you typically do when you know that your trademark is too likely to be rejected (as being too descriptive), but you want to give it a semblance of protection.
So, no, I wouldn't assume they have been treated better.
[0] https://data.inpi.fr/search?advancedSearch=%257B%2522checkbo...
The legal situation may have changed since 1991. For example: The ruling refers to "Regulation 2017/1001", which, as the name suggests, only came into force in 2017.
In contrast, open text is not descriptive in the sense of being a category of things. Therefore there is no risk that competitors would run into trademark issues by just describing their products.
Also, trademark decisions are always contextual to their time. Today’s meaning of ‘open’ in the context of software and data was not even coined in 1991, at that time people used ‘free software’ as term. Today I am not sure if ‘open text’ could still be trademarked.
https://www.tmdn.org/tmview/#/tmview/results?page=1&pageSize...
- one is "OpenText The Information Company" which seems perfectly fine. It's not descriptive of a category of "things"
- another is "OpenText Elite" : same comment
- and the last is the original "OpenText" French trademark from 1991, which expired 25 years ago.
It's entirely possible that it went through in '91 because, again, an "open text" isn't something that makes a lot of sense at the time of Minitel and typewriters, but could maybe be rejected today (which is why they now use a figurative trademark)
https://www.worldtrademarkreview.com/article/monster-energy-... https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/gods-and-monsters-started... https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-berkshire-46369442 https://www.thegamer.com/monster-energy-goes-after-glowstick... https://www.koreaboo.com/news/yg-entertainment-wins-trademar... https://www.gamesradar.com/monster-energy-has-even-gone-afte...
and many more.
If it has Open in the name it's something to do with open source and "AI" right? :)
Well if that's all that's at stake here, it seems very reasonable.
https://www.popsci.com/technology/apple-swiss-trademark/
Something is wrong, when this is happening.
That's not the reason they can't. They can't register the trademark because it's a descriptive one.
If I try to trademark "hacker forum", an EU trademark officer will reject it not because my website doesn't have hackers on it, but because it's descriptive and prevents others from starting hacker forums.
So
> They could call themselves... ClosedAI
is also incorrect, because it's descriptive as well.
Not the issue. Per the ruling even if their AI was open they still couldn't have the trademark.
Hopefully that was also a family suggestion because I can't think of a more sloppy name than "Microcomputer software"