Elon Musk faces yet another potential copyright controversy

Elon Musk is no stranger to branding and copyright controversies. Tesla is being sued by Blade Runner 2049's producers for using apparently AI-generated imagery inspired by the film, and, bizarrely, SpaceX once appropriated the logo of a small English football club.

Musk's AI company xAI has already had its copyright application for the Grok name rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) because of similarities to the AI chipmaker Groq and software provider Grokstream. But it turns out that a third company had already trademarked the exact same name as xAI's bot.

A tech startup called Bizly claims to the own the rights to the Grok brand name in the software as a service (SaaS) sector having lodged a trademark application back in 2021. Founder Ron Shah says his company's Grok is an asynchronous meetings platform that allows users to search their network to find experts in specific fields and then engage, contract and pay them.

Ron says he received messages of congratulations when Musk launched Grok because people assumed the billionaire Tesla CEO had bought the name from him. Not so, Ron says.

Bizly's Grok app was still in beta at the time. Ron says he was running a pilot with the financial services company Carta and was about to close a fundraising round but that things fell through due to investor concerns about a potential trademark dispute.

Ron says his company is now facing shut down. He wants to continue to develop his product under the Grok name but is struggling to get interested because potential clients and investors raise concerns over the brand.

"We really like the Grok name, but we don't have the financial power to compete with an $80bn company," Ron told me. "Even if Coca-Cola let another smaller beverage company use the Coke name, the smaller Coke would never be able to get anywhere given the sheer ubiquity of the bigger Coke. That's what we're facing here. It's a classic case of reverse trademark infringement."

Ron says that so far xAI has not responded to any of its attempts to make contact, and he says he hasn't ruled out legal action. "The bottom line is that we relied on USPTO protection when building our product and company," he says. "We were materially damaged when the name was used in the same category as our trademark by someone much bigger and more powerful than us."

It wouldn't be the first time that Elon Musk has chosen a brand name that was already in use. After he rebranded Twitter to X, several companies using the X name made complaints, including a social media company that recently reached a settlement with X. There was even a musician who was using the unicode character that X chose to use as a logo.

Musk has claimed that xAI took its chatbot's name from the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, in which 'grok' is apparently a Martian word. Ron says he came up with the name for Bizly's Grok during a brainstorming session in which a colleague used the word as a verb meaning to 'to understand', which apparently common in tech parlance.

US copyright law allows different companies to use the same brand name when they're in different categories and unlikely to cause confusion. Elon Musk’s ex partner Grimes has trademarked the Grok name for an AI-powered kids toy, which is unlikely to cause problems for xAI. The fact that Bizly's Grok is in the SaaS sector could be more problematic, but Bizly may struggle to defend its rights considering that its product hasn't yet made it to market.

Elon Musk may have fixed the optical illusion in the X logo, but the world's richest man has a not shortage of controversies on his hands at the moment. Viral anti-Tesla posters show just how badly the brand's reputation has been hit by the Cybertruck design disaster and Musk's politics.