Well, they could have used a less generic and misleading name (it is not very open, as noted in the article). OpenAI only really have themselves to blame here.
Plenty of companies use generic words for their name, and they still get trademarks.
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.
I understood it more in the line of preventing a company from naming itself "Low sugar" and then blocking other companies from adding the words "Low sugar" to their packaging. Same thing with OpenAI, another company should be free to create an AI that's fully open and tag it as "Open AI" without fearing legal problems with OpenAI.
I would say there is nothing descriptive about calling something American. America doesn't even refer to a single country, does it operate out of Brazil? Would that even be relevant information to anyone using an Airline?
Exactly. Apple can register Apple because they don't sell apples so it's not misleading. OpenAI can't register OpenAI because they make ai but it's not open. They could call themselves Peaches, OpenWombat or ClosedAI and there wouldn't be any issues because those wouldn't be misleading.
> OpenAI can't register OpenAI because they make ai but it's not open
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.
You know, if it was someone offering a truly open (weights + training data) and available model running on consumer hardware in a privacy sandbox, I would welcome that "harm".
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.
You just don't like OpenAI and are for anything that hurts them, without thinking through the consequences.
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 seems pretty dubious that there are a lot of people who know the name of the company behind ChatGPT but not able to recognize that the name of their chat isn't "OpenAI chat"