OpenAI loses trademark dispute at EU court
dpa-international.com189 points by hermanzegerman 6 hours ago
189 points by hermanzegerman 6 hours ago
> The EUIPO found that the word "open" would be understood by the relevant public as meaning freely accessible, while the combination with "AI" (artificial intelligence) would be interpreted as referring to products based on openly accessible artificial intelligence.
> 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
More pertinently "the term is purely descriptive and therefore lacks the distinctiveness required for trademark protection." I.e. the problem isn't that OpenAI's products don't match their description, but that trademarking it would unduly prevent others from describing their openly accessible artificial intelligence as "open AI."
>More pertinently "the term is purely descriptive and therefore lacks the distinctiveness required for trademark protection."
As I wrote in my other comment, "open systems" also can be purely descriptive and yet Open Systems seems to be a valid trademark in Europe.
I'm not defending OpenAI. I'm just confused that the rules for allowing trademarks for ordinary words and phrases don't look consistent at the surface level.
From the background information provided in the court decision:
"as regards the earlier similar registrations relied on by the applicant, the Board of Appeal recalled that those registrations did not represent current practice and case-law and that the legality of the decisions of the Boards of Appeal must be assessed solely on the basis of Regulation 2017/1001 and not on the basis of a previous administrative practice."
The fact that Open Systems hold a trademark on "Open Systems" is less a signal that OpenAI should be allowed to hold "Open AI", and more a sign that Open Systems should start considering changing their name because they'd lose their trademark if someone disputed it.
> I'm just confused that the rules for allowing trademarks for ordinary words and phrases don't look consistent at the surface level
Precedence in court decisions is weighted more in some places than others. US courts, from my pedestrian observation, are all into "well there is a precedent so we'll follow that". But other countries don't necessarily do that, their courts might be more eager to disregard it and do whatever they feel is appropriate in that situation. You can see it in how OpenAI reacted "The company also cited comparable trademark registrations previously granted by the EUIPO and registrations in more than 30 other countries, including the United Kingdom and Singapore" (well precedents say this and that...)
Even the US does change policies every once in a while. This is a case where Open Systems was last challenged under the old rule set when it was acceptably descriptive. Since that point standards have changed and, presumably, Open Systems might now be exposed to a similar mark challenge.
This sort of rejection is quite common. You can overcome the objection by submitting evidence that your mark has acquired distinctiveness through use. So there will be plenty of trademarks that seem generic/descriptive that have gone through that process.
edit: I originally thought that’s what was being rejected here. It’s not. The court only ruled that “OpenAI” is descriptive. Separately, OpenAI have also submitted evidence of acquired distinctiveness, which will be decided in due course by the trademark office.
Courts exist, among other things, to specify the rules in ambiguous cases. Rules will be ambiguous always.
I think there is most likely set of adjectives that would fall under same reasoning. GreenAI or FreeAI likely would be also be refused.
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.
UnicornAI. You’re welcome
An excellent example of something that clearly wouldn't be distinctive since all AI related endeavors bill themselves as unicorns.
Not sure that’s an adjective
If you use it like unicorn poop, then it is describing the kind of poop just like Open/Green/Free in previous examples would be describing AI
> RedAI
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?
And to think that this could have all been avoided if they'd just renamed themselves something more appropriate after they decided to focus fully on developing closed models for profit.
Someone finally asks some sensible questions, about hijacking of the term "open".
I seem to remember the company behind either Monster Cables, or Monster energy drinks, going after anyone that used the word “monster,” even in casual context.
The most ludicrous case of trademark issues I've seen to date has been Apple suing Prepear because they had a pear as their logo but Monster suing someone because of the term monster is not far from falling equally as far from the tree of wisdom and common sense.
Every large company does this to some extent, because thre's a concept in US trademark law that if you don't aggressively and pre-emptively defend your mark then 'constructive abandonment' becomes a valid defense against infringement. That means people can rip off your trade mark and then say in court 'well, I thought he company had given up ownership of the trademark because they didn't sue 'monster plush toys', so I decided to call my energy drink 'Monster Brew.'' This is also why US companies slap a 'TM' next to every instance of their trademark, even though it becomes a visual distraction in graphic design terms. Lawyers will argue that if you don't aggressively police the bounds of your intellectual property at all times then it evaporates.
It was Monster Cables who, blessedly, are nearly irrelevant nowadays. Apparently they tried to pivot into online gambling a few years ago.
I mean, it might also be Monster Cables, but Monster Energy is still doing it :).
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.
See also: Edge Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Games#Trademark_disputes
I thought you were joking, but that seemingly was the argument.
The argument doesn't hinge on whether OpenAI is actually open. Rather it seems to have to do with the name being insufficiently distinguishable from a generic term ("open AI"). I think it's a bizarre ruling given that everyone already knows what OpenAI is.
In the EU "well known marks" are protected even without registration, and block conflicting trademark applications
As such "everyone knows them" isn't a reason to allow a registration. It would just mean that blocking the trademark has no practical effect
Everyone on HN knows what OpenAI is, but there are tons of people who use ChatGPT and either don’t know OpenAI or don’t know the distinction between OpenAI (the company) and OpenAI (the conjunction of two words)
The linguistic gymnastics required when talking about OpenAI vs ChatGPT and Anthropic vs Claude is difficult when you're giving talk about them. At least Google vs Gemini is a little clearer.
I mean, I get the rationale Company vs. Product, but most people know the product. As in "I used ChatGPT". But if you ask who OpenAI is, they'll have no clue.
ChatGPT is in someways nicer... because their models are GPT-5.3, GPT-5.4, etc...
But when you're trying to explain that the Anthropic models are called "Opus" or "Sonnet" or "Haiku" or "Fable", but you use them in "Claude", it gets confusing quickly.
If the goal of a trademark is to get recognized then its futile given OpenAI is already popular. If the goal is to prevent others from using the term which is so generic then it does makes sense to not allow the common keywords being hijacked.
On a side note, the AI models from the company are not even open, one can go as far as banning it as inappropriate marketing (Product not matching the description).
I thought the trademark is to prevent costumers from accidentally buying “open AI” from some company other than openAI, while thinking they’re buying from openAI.
Yes, that is what a trademark is for, in general. In this case, the court ruled that the term "open AI" is too generic to qualify for that protection exactly because it is a purely descriptive term that could legitimately refer to any "freely available" model in common parlance.
> everyone already knows what OpenAI is
If it has Open in the name it's something to do with open source and "AI" right? :)
Trademark law isn't about what "everyone already knows". It's about whether a given mark meets the criteria for legal protection in a give context. So if say an foss ML project described what they do as "open AI" the company known as OpenAI would have a right to defend the mark. This is saying they could not.
> So if say an foss ML project described what they do as "open AI" the company known as OpenAI would have a right to defend the mark. This is saying they could not.
Well if that's all that's at stake here, it seems very reasonable.
Preventing companies named [adjective]+[product/service provided] doesn't seem sustainable.
This ruling is very early in the process and doesn't prevent anything - but given the more likely bad path outcome of this case for OpenAI it wouldn't disallow their usage of OpenAI but instead prevent them from shutting down competitors that claim to offer an open AI.
They haven't prevented that. They have prevented trademarking the terms, thus other people whose AI offerings are Open are in fact allowed to describe their products as an Open AI, I presume they are not allowed to describe their products as being OpenAI however as that would create consumer confusion.
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.
Preventing the hijacking and privatization of short phrases and language in general is actually an excellent thing. I applaud this decision, and wish for the rules to become even tighter.
Companies can be named after random nonsense, ‘pink catfish’ could easily be the world’s #1 supplier of firearms and nobody would find it strange.
Caterpillar, Apple, Kellogg, etc really don’t have anything to do with the underlying product but neither do people’s names.
They didn't have "open" or "free" as prefix.
The nouns also aren't just generic terms for the type of products they're making. OpenApple wouldn't sound confusing in the same way for a laptop and phone manufacturer as it would for a company producing apples in a non-open way.
But apple still goes after real apple producers, who are older than apple.
https://www.popsci.com/technology/apple-swiss-trademark/
Something is wrong, when this is happening.
You link is incorrectly paraphrasing this Wired article https://www.wired.com/story/apple-vs-apples-trademark-battle... by claiming that Apple sued Swiss farmers, even though Apple sued the Institute of Intellectual Property instead. Apple won the case a month after publication of that article https://bvger.weblaw.ch/pdf/B-4493-2022_2023-07-26_c897bf22-... and the Swiss Fruit Union continues to use their apple logo (which looks completely different from any of the apple images Apple has trademarked) https://www.swissfruit.ch
Caterpillar does have a lot to do with the product. It crawls on a track and a photographer thought the track looked like a caterpillar .
Caterpillar sells way more than tracked vehicles, and very much uses CAT as its logo.
Nintendo could have named itself after playing cards, but that wouldn’t have kept up with its current business model.
And they went out of their way to sue anyone that dare to use the cat word in the name or anything resembling an apple in the logo.
This seems a lot more sustainable than allowing me to trademark a tire company called "WinterTire" and enabling me to sue any other tire company that tries to capitalise on my trademark.
(And if WinterTire Co was anything like OpenAI, it'd be focused on making summer tires)
Key difference between the trademark systems here: in the EU system you don’t get a trademark by trading with a specific name and it then being recognized. It’s the other way around: the name must be unique, not confusing, and highly specific. It’s actually irrelevant whether a product exists or is traded at all.
Having gone through the process and gotten both approvals and rejections, the line is pretty clear.
This means light green to all EU tech companies using OpenAI name in their products! Even though can´t say for sure if is good or bad for a company doing that.
We had a similar result when a big U.S. defense company (Kratos) tried to take our open source project's domain name: open.space
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...
Good. The trademark would ultimately allow them to sue any company for claiming it provides "open AI". So only right choice to reject it.
ChatGPT is a household name. And OpenAi is actually not, people outside tech don't necessarily know it.
But people actively searching for AI products who are perhaps a little less technically inclined might. And if they stumble upon a platform that by all accounts seems to be affiliated with OpenAI, that could be problematic, especially with the level of trust people seem to be comfortable handing to LLMs.
But that's on OpenAI for selecting that company name. EU trademark law hasn't changed, this was always going to be a problematic trademark if challenged
They still have the trademark on their logo
If I search for "Open AI" on google right now the first search results are openai.com, chatgpt.com and the OpenAI wikipedia page. None of which are open AI.
Open source charity suddenly becoming capitalistic not going as planned
This really is the crux of the image, and now legal, issues. OpenAI hovered up tons of money and IP under the claim that they were doing this for the public good. Now they’ve essentially admitted that was all bullshit and that they want to sell the distillation of human created knowledge and content for a fee. It’s certainly bullshit to call that bait and switch “open”
The only problem I see here is the name doesn't reflect the reality. Time to put something in place that tells them to rebrand and continuously charges them for fraudulent misrepresentation or something until they do.
They should just rename it to ClosedAI.
It would be more honest to their customers and better show who they are and what they stand for.
I wonder how that trademark logic would apply to something like OpenGL.
At least the GL part isn't something that has a widely understood meaning and I don't think any of the competing APIs are generally refered to as Graphics Libraries either.
god thanks ClosedAI is still available
Trump administration intervening in ... 1... 2... 3...
Weird decision, if so I wonder what would they say about other trademarks like Apple..
Apple is a valid trademark in the "computers" category, but would not be accepted in the "food" category.
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.
Waiting for Apple to enter the food industry, with a highly specific McIntosh-based genetic lineage that they dub the "iApple".
I don't like the idea of trademarks that are so well-known that they apply in all fields. That doesn't serve the public. Companies that well-known can easily apply for a trademark across multiple fields. The trademark owners that would really need that kind of help are the smaller ones that aren't eligible for that, and must specifically register in various fields of industry.
IP law needs severe reform no matter which jurisdiction you're in (since the majority of the world signed the Berne Convention, the same reforms are needed everywhere)
But what's the alternative for the trademarks that are truly universally known? Does it serve the public for me to be able to sell unauthorized Coca-Cola brand products, or more likely, the trademark owner selling a token item in each category to maintain the right to prevent others from using it?
Hard to make it clearer that you didn't read/understand the decision than a post like this
[dead]
Touché
This seems like a bad decision to me that will ultimately harm consumers, if anyone can launch a product and say it’s made by “OpenAI”.
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.
> Even Microsoft is just a contraction of their original product, microcomputer software.
Hopefully that was also a family suggestion because I can't think of a more sloppy name than "Microcomputer software"
Give me a break. Apple doesn't sell apples.
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.
>OpenAI can't register OpenAI because they make ai but it's not open.
Not the issue. Per the ruling even if their AI was open they still couldn't have the trademark.
Open could mean open to integration (API), or opens your mind, or opens possibilities.
Do they have a trademark on the word apple with no other context? I thought it was Apple computer, which is distinct.
Apple is also a record label (that existed before the computer company), specifically one owned by the Beatles.
There were even some legal battles between them, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
Apparently it ended with Apple Computers buying the trademark from Apple (record company) and then licencing it back (weird but ok).
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".
It's not going to be something like that. Anyone legitimate is going to want to use a different name because of the confusion.
The only people naming something "OpenAI" are going to be trying to trick you into downloading their scammy chatGPT clone.
OpenAI would probably still have some kind of claim against a company that did that.
"It will harm consumers"
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
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"
As much as I hate OpenAI for hijacking the term "open", and I love the idea of OpenAI losing, I am not sure if I agree with it.
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.
As explained in the judgement, being well-known is irrelevant. This is not about consumer protection, but about brand protection.
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.
I trust the judges on that one, they know the law better than I do, obviously.
I am also not discussing about who is at fault, I agree that it is on OpenAI.
I just don't want, say, some company that is even shadier than OpenAI to launch an OpenAI branded protect with the intention to mislead people.
Maybe grant OpenAI the trademark, but do not allow them to use it on products that are not actually open, but I guess it is legally problematic.
>OpenAI is already a well known name in Europe
Are there brand awareness surveys that back that up?
> Trademarks are first intended to protect consumers
Huh? I thought they're intended to protect "innovation".
No, they are very much not. That's the supposed benefit of patents and/or copyright. Trademarks are for ensuring there is no consumer confusion about which company they are trading with.
I think you are confusing trademarks with patents.
Trademarks don't prevent you from copying anything, they only prevent you from being misleading regarding the origin.
I think patents are for innovation and trademarks are to make sure that people can reliably know who they’re dealing with.
This feels like a slight misstep that could result in consumer harm. The name is incredibly vague, without doubt, but to claim "OpenAI" doesn't evoke a very specific company at this point in the minds of consumers seems myopic.
Whether it evokes a specific company now isn't relevant to the ruling. The trademark was refused, and this was a challenge to that initial refusal, and the refusal was upheld.
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".
I completely agree with your last point. They shouldn't have ownership of "Open" in relation to "AI" broadly speaking, but their company name "OpenAI" should be protected.
Entirely possible, seeming more likely, that I didn't have enough background information on the short article.
The story about the ruling really doesn't explain why another company called OpenText that's been around since 1991 and has a valid trademark registration in EU but OpenAI would be invalid. OpenText also has its Europe headquarters in Germany: https://www.opentext.com/about/office-locations
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.
First of all, can you explain what an "open text" is?
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...
All OpenText EUIPO trademarks I can find are also figurative https://www.tmdn.org/tmview/#/tmview/results?page=1&pageSize...
Maybe I'm using that website wrong but I clicked on "Word" as a filter and got these that are not figurative :
https://www.tmdn.org/tmview/#/tmview/results?page=1&pageSize...
So, in your list of 3:
- 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)
> Any legal guesses as to why those 2 companies are treated differently with regards to the very generic words : "open", "text", "AI" ?
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.
Open AI has an independent descriptive meaning as composite term. You would practically trademark a whole class of products, not only a brand name.
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.
>Open AI has an independent descriptive meaning as composite term.
See my edit. "Open Systems" also had an independent descriptive meaning. The phrase "open systems" was a very common generic phrase in 1990s when companies talking about POSIX compliance was a big deal. (E.g. Microsoft touted POSIX in Windows NT.)
Maybe it's because in 1991 the word open in software wasn't ringing any bells for your average joe.
Basically the laws have changed since then, and OpenText is grandfathered in.