The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California recently ruled in favor of celebrity video platform Cameo, requiring OpenAI to stop using the name "Cameo" in its products and functions in a trademark dispute. Cameo, a platform that allows users to pay to customize video greetings and blessings to celebrities, accused OpenAI in the lawsuit of infringing its trademark rights and causing user confusion by using "Cameo" to name related functions in the video generation application Sora 2.
OpenAI named a feature at the time "Cameo" that would allow users to insert their own digital avatars into AI-generated videos.
The name "Cameo" is sufficiently similar to the branding of the Cameo platform to cause confusion among ordinary users as to the source, the court said in a ruling filed on Saturday. The court also rejected OpenAI’s argument that the term was merely a “descriptive term,” finding that the usage was closer to “suggestive” than “direct description of function,” and was therefore not protected by the descriptive term exemption.
As early as November last year, the court issued a temporary restraining order in response to Cameo's application, requiring OpenAI to suspend the use of the "Cameo" logo. Since then, OpenAI has renamed the feature from “Cameo” to “Characters” to continue offering users the ability to embed characters into videos.
Cameo CEO Steven Galanis said in a statement that the core of the brand the company has spent nearly a decade building is "respecting creators and emphasizing real connections" and often describes the platform's word-of-mouth effect as "every Cameo is advertising for the next one." He said that this victory was not only an important node for Cameo itself, but also a key maintenance of the platform's ecological integrity and the trust of thousands of creators, and emphasized that the company will continue to "strongly defend its intellectual property rights and take action against any platform that attempts to borrow the influence of the Cameo brand."
OpenAI responded to the media through a spokesperson that the company disagreed with the claim in the plaintiff’s complaint that “anyone can have exclusive ownership of the word ‘cameo’” and said it would continue to state its position in subsequent proceedings.
In recent months, OpenAI has been involved in disputes related to intellectual property and trademarks. Earlier this month, court documents revealed that OpenAI has abandoned the use of its "IO" branding on upcoming hardware products. In November last year, digital library application OverDrive sued OpenAI, accusing it of infringing OverDrive's registered "Sora" trademark by naming its video generation application "Sora". In addition, OpenAI has been involved in legal disputes with artists, creators, and media organizations in multiple countries and regions, involving issues such as copyright use and training data compliance, including cases in which Japanese publishers, animation studios, and German courts determined that it violated local copyright laws and awarded compensation.
This “Cameo” ruling marks a further step in judicial practice surrounding the boundaries between generative AI, trademarks, and brand rights. It also sounds a compliance alarm for other technology companies when naming and branding AI functions.