4 ms·
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
by jadayesnaamsi 3y ago
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.
- HPsquared 3y agoIn 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 3y agoCompany name vs product name
- eru 3y agoIn this example, the company is called Bayerische Motoren Werke AG. BMW is one of their trademarks. See also how there's a company named 'Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG' with a brand called 'Porsche'. But nowadays that company is just a subsidiary of Volkswagen, and they could restructure to make the Porsche AG disappear, without doing any changes to the brand.
- ben_w 3y ago> Volkswagen Also, this is literally "people's car".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thaumasiotes 3y agoAnd BMW is literally "Bavarian motor works". It's fun to know, but so what?
- ben_w 3y agoThey are examples of mundane descriptions which are, in fact, trademarks.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoBut they're not examples of mundane descriptions. BMW is much closer than Volkswagen is -- I doubt anyone has ever actually referred to a car as being "a car of the people" -- but "Bavarian motor works" is not a phrase that you'd expect anyone to use descriptively unless there was an appropriate referent, a set of car factories in Bavaria whose company affiliation was obscure or irrelevant. (Perhaps because there are many of them affiliated with different companies, but we're talking about things they have in common such as a demand for steel or technicians.) Had that been the case, and had the phrase been in common use, it would have been impossible to trademark "Bavarian Motor Works" to refer to part of the Bavarian motor works. But reality is different.
- littlestymaar 3y agoAren't M&M's a product name?
- littlestymaar 3y agoIt'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 3y agoWeirdly enough, Microsoft did get a trademark on "Windows". Perhaps OpenAI was counting on a similar decision.
- hulitu 3y agoThey have money, you know ...
- Kbelicius 3y agoAFAIK trademarks are granted for products. Microsoft was granted that trademark for software. If you opened a window shop and tried to trademark windows you'd fail since it is an existing term in that category. Similarly GPT is a term used in the filed of AI and thus would not be allowed to be trademarked in that category. I'm sure a window shop could trademark GPT for their line of windows.
- jbenjoseph 3y agoThis is called "descriptiveness", a very bad quality for a trademark application to have.
- bonton89 3y agoMicrosoft once sued a teenager for trademark infringement for having a website called MikeRoweSoft.com. The kid's name was Mike Rowe and he lost the website in a settlement.
- kube-system 3y agoThat’s because it is expensive for kids to defend lawsuits, not because a court agreed.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoStill redirects to microsoft.com
- keiferski 3y agoThe real question is whether beemer is trademarked.
- vrighter 3y agoto 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.