> Registration is refused because the applied-for mark merely describes a feature, function, or characteristic of applicant’s goods and services.
Apple is a brand name that contains no technical information, whereas GPT is a technical term describing what the software does. OpenAI cannot patent transformers or generative pretraining, so it makes no sense for them to be able to trademark "generative pre-trained transformer."
So a better analogy would be Apple trying to trademark Screen Time so that no other smartphone OS could name its usage-tracking feature "Screen Time" - you can't trademark a description of what the software does.
"App Store" would be my example, as they had a legal fight over that, initially getting the trademark then not being able to prevent Amazon using "Amazon Appstore".
"Are consumers likely to be confused?" is the way lawyers explained the positive case to me. An "Apple" computer isn't likely to be bought by accident to be used as an ingredient in a fruit salad, but a "Sorny" TV might well be bought instead of a "Sony" model.
They also follow this up with "you have to aggressively defend trademarks just in case".
Which is why Apple Corps and Apple Computer had several legal battles over the years, especially once Apple (the computer company) started selling music
Apple is a brand name that contains no technical information, whereas GPT is a technical term describing what the software does. OpenAI cannot patent transformers or generative pretraining, so it makes no sense for them to be able to trademark "generative pre-trained transformer."
So a better analogy would be Apple trying to trademark Screen Time so that no other smartphone OS could name its usage-tracking feature "Screen Time" - you can't trademark a description of what the software does.