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Comment by cientifico | Hacker News Reader

I find it surprising how quickly we rush to pass judgment on OpenAI's actions without understanding the motivations behind their attempt to trademark. It's possible that they are seeking protection against others who might register the same, or it could be a measure to prevent customers from unknowingly sharing sensitive company data with a GPT indexer unrelated to OpenAI. If anyone has evidence of OpenAI acting in bad faith, please share it.

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Given how they characterise GPTs in general as custom versions of chatGPT (https://openai.com/blog/introducing-gpts), I don't think it's a stretch to assume they're not being very benevolent in this trademark attempt. You should also be asking for evidence that they are acting in good faith, if you're interested in determining their actual motivations.

I have evidence of them acting in bad faith: They're trying to trademark a generic term.

If they're worried about people confusing their service with others, shouldn't they then just choose a different name than the tech it's built on? I don't see MySQL or others being afraid of them being confused with other databases.

MyGPT is almost definitely trademarkable. (Although MySQL might sue).

I don't think the debate here is about motivation - the concern is that in itself, regardless of the reasons, attempting to trademark a generic technical term is bad behaviour.

This "they have to do bad thing or someone else might" excuse is not working out anymore for me.

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