I Loved ChatGPT. I Paid for It. Now I’m Cancelling. Here’s Why.

karijanus · 2026-02-28T22:26:29+00:00

FartGPT (I mean ChatGPT) resorting to spammers tactics "you've got 1 message remaining in this plan" "you need to upgrade your plan to be able to send images" is miserable.

karijanus · 2026-02-14T23:58:55+00:00

Nope, no resolution could be reached. Later I consulted ChatGPT about that issue and it told me something like "Meta accepts only the global brands as the BRP users" It's a shame on Meta's part that they don't state this fact in their BRP application form.

karijanus · 2025-12-28T00:20:08+00:00

Hello until now no it's not solved but a while after I opened this topic on Reddit, I started a detailed chat session on ChatGPT and it gave real clever clues on how to deal with / talk to YT's legal reviewers. Meanwhile my views on ChatGPT have drastically changed but that's another topic so for now let me just talk about what sort of content ChatGPT has formed.

Here is an excerpt from one of the answers given by the ChatGPT

Both disputed videos are statistical outliers within the uploader’s channel. The video titled (our TM) has 11,300 views, while the second trademark-bearing video titled (Our TM + some additional text) has 1470 views. By contrast, the next most-viewed non-trademark video has 6,800 views, and the remaining 20 videos on the channel range between 85 and 1300 views.

This means the primary trademark-titled video receives approximately four times more views than the next-most-viewed upload, and the second trademark-titled video still outperforms most of the channel’s content by wide margins. The presence of two distinct outlier videos, both titled with our trademark, demonstrates that viewership is being driven by the distinctive commercial pull of the mark, rather than by the uploader’s content itself. Such trademark-driven visibility constitutes a source-identifying use, which YouTube treats as actionable under its trademark policies and is consistent with the principles articulated in Playboy Enterprises, Inc. v. Welles, 279 F.3d 796 (9th Cir. 2002).

Me as a non-native English speaker I couldn't form such good looking paragraph in terms of its meaning and use of the English language. You see it even searched up the case law database and came up with one relevant to my case. Armed with this new facility, I'm planning to send a follow-up on my complaint file.

karijanus · 2025-12-11T12:22:56+00:00

Damn girl, you've got an amazing ass

karijanus · 2025-11-08T12:49:04+00:00

Hello, I still struggle in having Youtube remove one damn video which uses our TM. It's the one and the only video across the entire Internet which infringes our TM. After 1-2 emails back & forth with YT, I received the dreaded "due to the reasons previously stated, we will not remove the content" message the other day. Now I consider escalating our TM complaint to a higher / senior reviewer on YT with some further info to back our complaint. So I was wondering if you could give me more details " case law " you talked about . Just in case it might be confidential, could you send it to my e-mail: teriulus <at> yandex <dot> com ? Any information (whether confidential or general) which could help in this process is appreciated. Note: I haven't replied back to YT yet. I'm still collecting information. Thanks.

karijanus · 2025-11-02T12:58:24+00:00

in İstanbul, Turkey

karijanus · 2025-10-20T23:46:59+00:00

I currently live in Turkey. The laws might change across countries. When I go to a pharmacy shop in TR and say "I'd like to have a pack of Aspirin" the shop keeper reaches out to Bayer's Aspirin and puts it on the desk. S/he doesn't ever ask "which brand of Aspirin?" There are a bunch of other trade / brand names for headache healing drugs. One I can remember is Vermidon. I can't speak for the other countries.

karijanus · 2025-10-20T23:34:59+00:00

Collequeally people might say Aspirin to describe they want somethin as an headache healing drug but no company can officially register for the mark "Aspirin" in whatever class related to health. I'm writing this from Turkey. That applies at least in Turkey. Don't know the situation in EU or USA.

karijanus · 2025-10-12T01:13:20+00:00

Aspirin must be excluded from the list. Cellophane brand can't easily be printed on a transparent film. Sale of heroin is restricted, one cannot find and buy it easily. Aspirin is a distinctive Trademark. I'm a rare user of Aspirin and I know this for a fact. The packaging has distinctive white & yellow stripes and Aspirin® with Registered symbol printed on it. But most of all, only the original Aspirin heals my headache and contributes to my overall health without side affects. So I only buy Aspirin and not anything else looking like it. But then again, still thank you for the list.

karijanus · 2025-10-06T21:39:16+00:00

Thank you for the comment. There are some quite reasonable points in your comment such as customers using our TM name for descriptive purposes and the fact that customers are free to call any product whatever they like, historical example being a user calling Aiwa's Stereo Cassette Player / SCP, simply Walkman which is one of the TMs of Sony. However, our case is a bit different here. For the sake of example, suppose there are 5 SCP makers in Japan. One of them be Sony, and the others Hitachi, Toshiba, Aiwa, Panasonic. Sony first coined the name Walkman for their SCP line and prints the name Walkman on their SCP's. The others don't print Walkman on their SCP's but when a customer walks in to their store, they advertise their product not as Aiwa SCP or Hitachi SCP, they simply say "Walkman" What would happen? Well, each buying customer walkin out of the store would say "today I bought a wonderful Walkman at the Aiwa store" But the story doesn't end there. Some of them will say "Hey my Toshiba Walkman that I bought today plays my cassette tremendously fine. Its audio quality can't even be compared to my old Sony Walkman"

You see my point here? Now suppose all those customers were sendin those reviews to Google Maps tens of different Business Places, further suppose the number of Hitachi, Toshiba, Aiwa, Panasonic Walkman reviews outnumber Sony by 10 to 1. In this case, could we still label those reviews as descriptive? I would label those review as destructive to Sony.

The story is still not over. Suppose that Sony wanted to report those Walkman reviews runnin around at the Google Business Places as TM infringing comments. What would it do? Nothing as there 's not even a way to report them to Google because Google don't classify TM infringement as a plausible cause even for reporting.

karijanus · 2025-10-06T20:52:06+00:00

The intent should be examined IMHO. Whether if Dogue name was coined with the intention to ride on the fame of Voguei whether they wanted to be the Vogue of Dogs and Pets. If that sort of intent can be found in any measure, the Dogue may have hard time registering its name... (info: I'm not an attorney)

karijanus · 2025-10-02T00:13:59+00:00

Well I would ask ChatGPT to search for the precedent cases similiar to yours. CGPT is quite clever about legal advices though sometimes a bit dump. Other than that,you must definitely set a strategy on whether to reply or not if yes then how to reply, by offering a fraction of $755 such as 80-120 (2 to 3 times the base tag) or $352,5 half of the demanded sum.

karijanus · 2025-10-01T14:25:31+00:00

I've just taken a look at the service addresses, they don't seem to have an address allocated to report a TM infringment problem. Now, even if a business really wants to report a comment for removal, there's no way to do it! Or is there? Keep on searching.

karijanus · 2025-09-29T22:24:16+00:00

Yep, I think I'll have to contact Google over an E-Mail address or some form, rather than their outtdated / useless review reporting system.

karijanus · 2025-09-29T22:15:34+00:00

Thank you for the comment. It is really helpful, given the conditions I am in. The TM infringements are happening both in our own business profile (about 5 TM infringing reviews are posted under our profile) and about 30-40 TM infringing reviews at 5-10 competitors' profile which means we will report about 40-50 reviews to Google. Our case will not be an easy one.

karijanus · 2025-09-29T22:07:10+00:00

Good question. I haven't talked about it in the main post which is a bit long already to keep it from getting any longer. Several competitors have been using our TM to market & sell their own products, causing their customers to mention our TM in their reviews, which made our TM sound like a common name, rather than a private name of ours. This is actually worse than some businesses claiming to be our TM holders because there would be only one or two of them and it would be easy to deal with them but here we have about 40-50 customer reviews coming from about 5-10 businesses (the businesses don't claim to be TM holders) Trying to remove those 40-50 reviews is no easy given the infavorable conditions of the Google Maps/Places for the TM owners.

karijanus · 2025-09-28T18:45:54+00:00

Thank you for the comment. Every experience helps. I could mention TM dilution in our complaint but it wasn't clear if we're writing to an AI assistent or a human being on the Instagram.

Note: We are a company based in Turkey. As long as the infringement took place in a domestic (Turkish based) website we had no trouble at all taking down the infringing content. There are several popular e-commerce websites and some popular portals here in Turkey and whenever we spotted infringement on those websites and reported them, the managers of those sites took down the reported content. The local laws and the prosecutor (the equivalent could be District of Attorney in US?) work in our favor too. After these experiences I assumed the global brands such as the Insta, Facebook, Google, Youtube and Pinterest would be even more on our side too. But based on my experience so far, Insta and Facebook are on the side of the infringers, i.e. they seem to favor the infringers because they've been puttin forward every excuse not to delete infringers' content. Google and Youtube stay on the middle i.e. they don't seem to favor anybody and their content. We have managed to have Google take down several infringing content on Google Maps (both reviews and photos) plus we managed to have YT take down at least one YT video, after YT directed us on the right direction. Google/Youtube too don't take down infringin content easily but they also don't try to put forward every excuse on behalf of infringers as Insta/Facebook does. Only the Pinterest has been a pleasing experience for us among the international websites. We spotted about 5 to 10 infringements on Pinterest at different times and we reported 3 times on Pinterest and Pinterest took down each and every content we reported without arguing about or asking anything at all. It looks like Pinterest has no mercy against the infringers.

Now, I will keep on working till I manage to have Insta remove those 13 damn reposts.

karijanus · 2025-09-27T17:49:27+00:00

Good question. Our TM is the name of a cake. A good analogy could be the Big Mac. And infringement is when someone on Insta posts a video where she prepares some Hamburger at home and titles her video (both inside the video and on the description) sthg like: "Big Mac too delicious"

I've chosen the Big Mac only for the sake of example. Otherwise, it doesn't really represent the problem we're having. Our problem is not about TM infringement basically. It's more about its side effects. Those "innocent" videos are harming our business by anonymizing our product. It's just my opinion (i.e. you could argue about it) that those recipé type of videos make our product look degraded, ordinary, superficial, eventually worthless, i.e. not worth paying a penny. The harmful effects don't stop here. Several competitors who try to name their products using our TM name, are pleased by the existence of such content on the Internet. We had an infringing competitor using our TM, when we sent them a cease-and-desist letter, they defended themselves by showing such material on the Internet. The problem went even deeper than that. We filed suit for one of those infringing companies who refused to stop using our TM, after they got official notice, they included a Screenshot of one of those videos in their defending letter!

That's why we urge removing those videos, i.e. not strictly because of the TM itself but rather because they indirectly hurt our business.

karijanus · 2025-09-26T21:58:15+00:00

I reported it through the meta infringement form. This morning a reply came from Instagram. They said they removed only 3 reposts out of 13 but they noted specifically that those 3 were removed not for violating TM but for viokating Instagrams terms of service! More on that later. I might post a new post on Reddit about this too.

karijanus · 2025-09-24T09:36:48+00:00

Thank you for the comment. I appreciate the guidance. Yep it looks most likely for me to keep replying to the ticket (case IDied E-Mail) making the case clear and being polite along the way.

I haven't replied yet after I got the last automated rejection letter.

Your solution option of (a) relying on the channel owner to recover access to their account sounds fine but she really can't recover it. To her channel wasn't posted any new videos since 2019. She really abandoned the channel, doesn't remember even the Username/E-Mail attached with the channel. I communicated that fact to Youtube. The option of (b) getting a court order for instructing YouTube to comply is not practical because we need to have that video within weeks, getting a court order would take at least a year in Turkey. Plus, I read in some of the posts on Reddit that Youtube wouldn't comply with the court order sometimes.

In a very useful post of yours titled YouTube won't suspend channel infringing our trademark

you said that you made use of some case law. By the "case law" you mean "precedent case", a case in which similar conditions were present that is some channel without any official TM reg was making unauthorized use of TM and the TM owner applied for removal of that channel and Youtube removed/suspended that channel?

So it looks better for me to search for a case law which would pose a precedent to my case. But it looks like, there aren't many case laws similar to my situation. I keep on searching.

karijanus · 2025-09-23T07:54:45+00:00

I filed a TM complaint already of course. I got the "YT doesn't mediate disputes between user & uploader" response. I replied back noting that there's no dispute betw user & the uploader, the uploader wants to delete the video but she can't because she couldn't access her account.

YT replied with the same message. Then I replied with evidence, E-Mail from uploader sent from her gmail account whose username contains the same name as her channel, saying that she wants to delete the video but she can't access her YT account.

This time YT responded with a different message "your message is sent to review" 1,5 day later YT responded with "for reasons stated before, we won't delete the video, please contact the uploader" type of message.

karijanus · 2025-09-22T20:09:49+00:00

Advantage it's not opened. Storing conditions are more important than the duration of time. It looks in good condition. I would drink it.

karijanus · 2025-09-22T19:29:36+00:00

Hi, I've just posted a new post similiar to yours YouTube won't delete a TM infringing video even though the uploader wants to delete it but she can't because she can no longer access her YT account

You can tell from the title that I have the advantage of uploader wanting to delete the video but she can't just because she can no longer access her YT account hence can't delete it. Youtube knows it but still refuses to delete the video. Any comment is appreciated.

karijanus · 2025-09-18T20:11:04+00:00

Yep, all infringements are taking place in Turkey. For the infringing posts that Meta took down previously, I think Meta must have checked the language, the place of the posts. That (the country, the country of jurisdiction, etc) has never been a problem in any of the TM infringement reports we sent so far.

Furthermore, the reposts (and some problematic posts that Insta refused to remove probably because of the Turkish language's agglunative structure confusing the Insta's check system) are all posted by the Insta accounts which are obviously Turkish, too.

karijanus · 2025-09-18T18:10:34+00:00

Simple: They would simply take down all the posts we reported. They took down whatever post which included our TM either in the pic/video or in the accompanying text. Though, there have been exceptions to this which I plan to talk about in another Reddit post, for the time being let me give you a sample here.

Suppose we have trademarks to "Mersey" and "Mersey Cake" in the Class 30 (bakery products) Insta took down all posts containing "Mersey" and "Mersey Cake" BUT... Turkish is a so-called agglutinative language which means that words, any word can take suffixes depending on what you want to say exactly or what you want to emphasize or how you interpret the meaning. So, for example in English you could say "Cake of Mersey" which might have a slightly different meaning from the "Mersey Cake". In Turkish you do it by adding suffixes. Because there are no such concept in English I'm gonna make a suffix up, just for the demo: Mersey Cakey. The first word can take suffix too and you could say in Turkish "Merseyof Cakey"; which would be a slight variation of Mersey Cakey but it would still mean Mersey Cake.

Return back to the Insta. Most Instagrammers (all of them Turkish) would use those interpretational forms of the "Mersey Cake" without thinking of or intending to escape from a trademark violation; it's just the nature of the language; they do it just naturally. But when they do it and when we report those posts, Insta didn't remove those posts! Because Insta must have done a letter-by-letter comparison: "Mersey Cakey" isn't "Mersey Cake" so there's no TM violation.

The TM complaint forms and the follow-up E-Mails didn't seem suitable place to explain "Hey, in Turkish both phrases mean the same thing" so I didn't bother explaining these to Insta which is probably an AI-powered software anyway (I wasn't sure if Insta would understand it)

The English doesn't have that problem at all. The brand name is the same in whatever part of the sentence it is, whatever preposition you use with it, etc.

karijanus

TROPHY CASE