Rockstar Logo Certificate Switches to Prior Use Mark

On 21 September 2026 a certificate was logged that changes how Rockstar Games proves ownership of its own logo. It is a DigiCert Verified Mark precertificate, and against the certificate currently serving Rockstar's brand mark it does three things: it reclassifies the mark from Registered Mark to Prior Use Mark, it drops both the GB jurisdiction field and the UK trade mark number, and it anchors its evidence to an Internet Archive capture of rockstargames.com. Rockstar's robots.txt tells the Internet Archive crawler not to come in. That line is first in the file. What a BIMI certificate is, and why brand logos appear in Gmail Brand Indicators for Message Identification, BIMI, is the mechanism that puts a company's logo next to its emails in Gmail, Apple Mail and Yahoo. The logo is not attached to the message. The mail client looks up a DNS record on the sending domain, follows it to a hosted image and to a certificate, and shows the logo only if the certificate vouches for the company's right to the mark. That certificate is a Verified Mark Certificate, and it is issued by a small number of certificate authorities after an evidence check. The evidence can come from two places. Either the company holds a registered trade mark, and the certificate records the jurisdiction and the registration number, or the company demonstrates prior use of the mark without pointing at a registration. Both are legitimate BIMI categories. What is live today, and it has not changed CONFIRMED. This desk's editor resolved the BIMI TXT record for default._bimi.rockstargames.com over DNS-over-HTTPS at 2026-09-24T03:37Z. The record reads, verbatim: v=BIMI1; l=https://vmc.digicert.com/53a6a0ac-e14e-4b8e-91ab-d7daa0d41b56.svg; a=https://vmc.digicert.com/53a6a0ac-e14e-4b8e-91ab-d7daa0d41b56.pem The certificate that record points to answered HTTP 200 at 8,718 bytes and was parsed locally with openssl. Its serial is 060551AF823472F34D022C3BB4A2ABE8, its issuer is DigiCert Verified Mark RSA4096 SHA256 2021 CA1, and it is valid from Feb 12 00:00:00 2026 GMT to Feb 11 23:59:59 2027 GMT. Inside it, three BIMI extensions carry the evidence: 1.3.6.1.4.1.53087.1.13 = Registered Mark, 1.3.6.1.4.1.53087.1.3 = GB, and 1.3.6.1.4.1.53087.1.4 = UK00004290457. The subject address is 622 Broadway. Nothing about that has changed and nothing changes for anyone reading email today. The live record still serves the February 2026 Registered Mark certificate, and it does not expire until 11 February 2027. That sentence is the most important one in this article and it is why the rest of it is written carefully. What was logged on 21 September CONFIRMED. A new record appears in the public certificate transparency logs, crt.sh id 29511574516, fetched at HTTP 200 and 3,881 bytes. Serial 0C5F727655F2C57B6D03BE49052B650C, valid from Sep 21 00:00:00 2026 GMT to Oct 22 23:59:59 2027 GMT. Side by side with the live certificate: FieldLive certificate, Feb 2026New precertificate, 21 Sep 2026 Serial060551AF823472F34D022C3BB4A2ABE80C5F727655F2C57B6D03BE49052B650C Validity12 Feb 2026 to 11 Feb 202721 Sep 2026 to 22 Oct 2027 Mark type (.1.13)Registered MarkPrior Use Mark Jurisdiction (.1.3)GBabsent Trade mark number (.1.4)UK00004290457absent Evidence location (.5.1)not applicablea web.archive.org capture of rockstargames.com Address622 Broadway622 Broadway 4TH FL Both certificates carry the same serialNumber = 3183880, the same jurisdictionST = Delaware and the same organisation string Rockstar Games, Inc., so this is the same legal entity in both records. The address gaining a floor number is a detail of how the address was typed, not a relocation, and it is reported here as nothing more than that. It is a precertificate, which matters A precertificate is a commitment logged before issuance. It exists so that certificate transparency monitors can see a certificate coming. It is not a deployed certificate. The final leaf may differ from it in any field, and it may never be issued at all. CONFIRMED from crt.sh, queried by organisation: 465 entries in total, of which 7 are Verified Mark certificates across 4 distinct serials. SerialNot beforeNot afterCT entries 0f2cc4cdaa92917110cffdf8cdf854772025-06-232026-06-222 069c08474793d65f852cd84a5b6e3ae62025-10-212026-10-202 060551af823472f34d022c3bb4a2abe82026-02-122027-02-112 0c5f727655f2c57b6d03be49052b650c2026-09-212027-10-221 Every earlier certificate appears twice, once as a precertificate and once as the issued leaf. The new one appears once so far. The second entry is what would turn this from an intention into a fact, and at the time of this read it is not there. Three figures here are this desk's own arithmetic. The new certificate's start date sits 143 days before the live certificate's expiry, so the two windows overlap by that much. The new certificate's validity runs 396 days against 364 for the live one. And 7 CT entries across 4 serials is the whole of the Verified Mark history visible in that log. The evidence URL, and the robots.txt line CONFIRMED. The new precertificate carries the extension 1.3.6.1.4.1.53087.5.1, which is where a Prior Use Mark points at its evidence. Its value is a web.archive.org capture of https://www.rockstargames.com/ taken on 1 September 2025. CONFIRMED. This desk's editor fetched rockstargames.com/robots.txt twice. HTTP 200, 311 bytes, sha256 5912fa009c90e25451be0cc149332e4de9d01342adfa0ff133ab496e5a8c913b. The first block in that file, verbatim: User-agent: ia_archiverDisallow: / ia_archiver is the Internet Archive's crawler. The same file also disallows Applebot-Extended, CCBot, cohere-ai, cohere-training-data-crawler, ClaudeBot and GPTBot, so the archive line sits in a general block on automated collection rather than standing alone. So the position is this. A certificate that vouches for a company's right to display its own logo in your inbox anchors its evidence to an archive of a website that asks that archive not to crawl it. That is a neat circle and it is worth noting once. It is also worth saying plainly that the ia_archiver line predates this certificate by a long way, that robots.txt is advisory rather than enforced, and that this desk is not suggesting the two facts are connected or that anybody did anything improper. They are simply both true at the same time. What this desk did not and will not say Four limits, printed here rather than buried at the bottom. First, the change is from one legitimate BIMI evidence basis to another. Prior Use Mark is a category DigiCert offers and a great many well-known brands use it. A switch to it has several innocent explanations, including a registration sitting inside a renewal window, an administrative preference, or a decision to run the evidence off use rather than registration. This article states the change and does not diagnose it. Second, and this follows from the first, nothing here says Rockstar lost, abandoned or failed to renew a trade mark. The status of UK00004290457 is UNCHECKED by this desk. The UK Intellectual Property Office search returned a captcha to this session and was not worked around. Anyone repeating this story who turns a missing certificate field into a lapsed registration is inventing the part that matters. Third, this desk could not open the Wayback capture. That host is blocked by this session's egress policy. So nothing is claimed about what that capture shows, what state the site was in on 1 September 2025, or whether it displays the mark at all. Fourth, the precertificate point again. Until a second log entry appears for that serial, the correct description is that an issuance was logged, not that a certificate is in use. How to check any of this yourself Certificate transparency is public, which is the whole point of it. Search crt.sh for an organisation name and you get every certificate a participating authority has logged for it. For BIMI, query the TXT record at default._bimi. in front of a domain, follow the a= value to the PEM file, and read the extensions out of it with openssl. Every figure above was produced that way. Why it is worth a reader's attention with 56 days to go to 19 November 2026, which is this desk's own arithmetic: brand verification in email is one of the few defences against messages that pretend to come from a publisher during a launch window, and this desk has already had to warn about impersonation sites in the fake demo infostealer piece. For the wider picture of how Rockstar defends its marks, see our coverage of the R logo opposition at the TTAB, and for the parody brand and domain side of it, the fictional brands explainer. The state of it One certificate is live and unchanged, serving a Registered Mark with a UK number attached, valid until February 2027. One precertificate was logged on 21 September 2026 that would replace that basis with Prior Use and drop the registry fields, pointing instead at an archived page this desk cannot open. It has not appeared as an issued leaf. Everything beyond that is speculation, and this article is not making any.