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."

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.

I thought you were joking, but that seemingly was the argument.

Preventing companies named [adjective]+[product/service provided] doesn't seem sustainable.

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...

> 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.

Maybe it's because in 1991 the word open in software wasn't ringing any bells for your average joe.

>OpenAI is already a well known name in Europe

Are there brand awareness surveys that back that up?

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.

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”

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.

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".

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

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.

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".

The EU shouldn't be held to bad decisions made by the US trademark office.

Ah yes, classic max capitalism take