Quinn Emanuel scored an important victory for OpenAI when U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers granted the ChatGPT maker’s motion for a preliminary injunction against a company and its owner who were using “Open AI” and the domain name open.ai.
The Defendants vigorously argued against the injunction, alleging that they held superior trademark rights, they were the senior user, that OpenAI has known about their use, that—unlike OpenAI—they had a registered trademark, that OpenAI’s mark was merely descriptive and had no secondary meaning, that more than a year before the lawsuit, OpenAI wanted to buy their domain name and “related IP rights,” and that OpenAI’s “delay” doomed its claims.
Quinn Emanuel fought back, rejecting Defendant's claims, exposing Defendants’ deceptive conduct to the US Patent and Trademark Office, and demonstrating that none of Defendants’ various alleged uses were bona fide uses in commerce sufficient to give rise to trademark rights, the victory established that OpenAI’s mark was, as Judge Gonzales Rogers found, “one of the most recognized in the artificial intelligence industry, if not the world.”