In March of this year, OpenAI filed a UDRP proceeding against the ChatGPT.com domain name at the World Intellectual Property Organization. OpenAI’s ChatGPT service has become one of the most popular artificial intelligence-driven chat platforms with well over 100 million users. The company uses chat.openai.com for its ChatGPT platform.
Prior to the filing of the UDRP, ChatGPT.com had been used by a website called ChatAI.com. You can have a look at how it was being used by visiting Archive.org. After the UDRP was filed, Whois privacy was lifted, and the Whois record showed the domain name was owned and used by a company in Puerto Rico called Site Matrix.
It appears that a settlement has been reached between OpenAI and Site Matrix. ChatGPT.com is now forwarding to OpenAI’s website. In addition, the Whois record for ChatGPT.com is once again private. I do not believe the registrant would have the ability to change anything related to the Whois record while a dispute is ongoing, so that indicates the dispute was resolved
I don’t know if there was any financial settlement involved in this dispute. Generally speaking, the only incentives I can think of for a respondent to settle a UDRP dispute early is if a payment is made or in order to prevent an adverse UDRP decision. In addition, even if a UDRP panel ruled in favor of the respondent, it could have been a Pyrrhic victory if the complainant opted to escalate this to the courts, where legal fees can add up quickly.
At the time of publication, the WIPO website indicates the case is still active, so I will keep an eye on it to confirm this is what happened.
The whole UDRP procedure is so unwarranted, in my opinion – because there is no trademark infringement until and unless a domain is *used* in an infringing way, and even then the remedy for the trademark holder should simply be to sue so that the infringing use is stopped and damages are compensated for, just like trademark holders in non-domain-related matters have to do – and the procedure is so holding the domain market down, scaring buyers from paying large prices for domains because the domains can so easily be taken away from them with a little help from ICANN’s baseless deference to the trademark lobby, for whatever reason, that I don’t know why more domainers and the ICA simply don’t demand it (and laws like ACPA) be completely and totally scrapped. If that happened I think there would be many more large sales, some perhaps going into nine figures.
100% agree with what you wrote!
UDRP has shown that it has been abused and when it is being abused systematically, you must dis-engage and not utilize. Anyone knowing this and still utilizes is a bad faith agenda driven individual.