I remember learning that trademarks that have been genericized (like Band-Aid, Popsicle, Velcro, Clorox, etc) are at risk of losing their trademark or copyright.
Can someone explain to me how exactly does this work? Cause i never really understood this
Trademarks aren’t supposed to be a gift to the company, they’re a service to the public to help them know what they’re buying so they don’t get tricked into buying a counterfeit. If nobody expects velcro to come from one specific manufacturer anymore, that trademark isn’t serving the public and there’s no reason for it to be protected.
The Band-Aid company really really wants people to go to the store to buy some band-aids, but then only one box says “Band-Aid” on it so they buy that one because they don’t know what “adhesive bandages” are. They love that, it’s just illegal. So they have to make sure to run enough “BAND-AID™ BRAND ADHESIVE BANDAGES” ads to have a defense in court that no reasonable person is buying Band-Aid because they think that’s the only band-aid in the store. But they still want as many unreasonable people doing that as possible.
Trademark inherently can’t be generic. It has to refer to something distinct.
For example, apples have nothing to do with computers, so the name makes you think of the exact brand Apple computers. But if you tried to trademark your apple company Apple, that would be taking away the ability of competitors to describe the product they’re selling. Which is not ok.
So, when your brand name becomes the common word to describe a product, you have to stop your competitors from using your name to advertise their products in the first place. Otherwise, your brand name doesn’t just refer to your products, so it’s not distinct. You’ve become Apple apples.
I get that a company would want to stop other companies using the genericized trademark. But is there any problem for consumers?
As far as I can tell, you can still buy Kleenex brand Kleenex’s and Q-tip brand Q-tips, and coke brand coke.
No, this is just a legal question about the degree to which companies are allowed to restrict their competitors’ marketing.
It’s funny you picked Apple computers because they were in a legal fight with Apple records of Beatles fame who’ve been around longer and were only allowed to keep the name if they stayed out of the music business. Which went well until iTunes and then they found themselves back in the lawsuit.
Hence the Sci-Fi channel’s rebrand to SyFy.
This song may help.
This is a Velcro commercial, in case anybody else thought about clicking the link.
Ahem… It’s a HOOK AND LOOP commercial. 😌
Already seen it.
It didn’t help
A trademark is a distinct way to refer to a business. The whole set of legal rights and privileges that this weird form of intellectual property gets are to make sure that when somebody talks about " dome guys tacos" they’re definitely talking about my tacos and not yours or some other persons.
If I let dumb guys tacos become a generic term that I don’t say hey, that’s not talking about my tacos anymore. Don’t do that then I’ve let my trademark become generic. This is unlikely to happen to actual tacos but if I had come up with a brand new pseudo taco dish and I called it the DCT, and then every Mexican restaurant in the country copied it and also called it the DCT, then the idea has become genericized and I can’t. Then at the end of it start trying to collect money from other people for calling the thing I invented and failed to produce by the name that has been attached to it.
This is of course entirely apart from the menu of how to create a DCT, we should be covered by copyright, or the specific set of instructions on how to create a DCT, which hypothetically I could get a patent on. (Although I don’t think they award patents for food.)
the not ELI5 version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
TIL that Heroin is a generisized trademark
You may think you love your family, but you don’t love them nearly as much as you’re going to love Heroin™!
