Velcro

Here's another generic trademark post. Did you realize that it was back in 1958 that Velcro was patented? It was invented by George de Mestral, an electrical engineer from Switzerland who applied for his first patent when he was 12 years old, for a model airplane.

While on a hunting trip, he hiked through patches of burdock, a thistly plant that spreads its spiny seeds by latching them onto anything or anyone passing by. Back home he was picking the burs off his dog’s coat and his own clothes and got curious about how they so effectively attached to surfaces.

a hook and loop fastener generically called velcro

Under a microscope, he saw that each bristle was a tiny hook that was able to catch in the loops of clothing. It took him 10 years to get his hook and loop working by being sewn to nylon. There were hundreds of loops per inch and the initial production was slow and inefficient.

That is the origin story for the product. The word's origin is the combination (a portmanteau) of the beginnings of two French words velour, meaning "velvet" and crochet meaning "hook."

Velcro BVBA is a privately held company that produces fasteners and other products. It is the original patentor of the hook-and-loop fastener. Like other companies, it is not thrilled that their original product has been attached to generic products that are called "velcro."

TiVo

By TiVo Inc., CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

TiVo (TEE-voh) is a digital video recorder (DVR) developed and marketed by TiVo Corporation and introduced in 1999. TiVo is both the company and the DVR product that allows the scheduled recording of television programs.

As the early leader in this category, the name began to be a generic trademark used for all DVRs, particularly as a verb - "I tivoed that show."

It is sais that hundreds of anmes were considered for the company/product including "Bongo" and "Lasso." The final name is a combination of TV (in caps) for the television aspect, and the i and o (lower case) referencing the acronym "I/O," which is used in tech applications to mean "input/output."

Generic Trademarks

Registered trademark symbol

A generic trademark (AKA genericized trademark or proprietary eponym) is a trademark or brand name that becomes so popular that is has become either generic name for, or synonymous with, a general class of product or service. This is not something that a trademark holder wants to happen. So, in this case, you can be too popular. The process of a product's name becoming genericized is known by the rather terrible term of genericide.

When this genericide occurs, its original owner loses some of their intellectual property. Examples of generic trademarks include: Thermos, Kleenex, ChapStick, Aspirin, Dumpster, Band-Aid, Velcro, Hoover, Jet Ski and Speedo. This process sometimes is limited to a particular country, though it can apply worldwide. (List of generic trademarks)

A recent case is Chooseco LLC, the publisher of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” book series, suing Netflix Inc., saying the streaming company’s recently released interactive film “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch” used the series’ trademark without permission. As is always the case, the trademark owner claims that this use is besmirching the brand’s value.

The generic "teleprompter" is now used for the display device that prompts a person speaking with an electronic visual text like cue cards. It began as the product TelePrompTer (with that internal capitalization) back in the 1950s.

The Otis Elevator Company advertised that it offered "the latest in elevator and escalator design," and thereby used the generic term "elevator" along with Otis's trademark "Escalator" product of moving staircases in the same way. Later, the Trademark Office and the courts concluded that, if Otis used their trademark in that generic way, they could not stop Westinghouse from calling its moving staircases "escalators", and a valuable trademark was lost through genericization.

In America, aspirin is the generic name for the product sold by many companies. But it is still a Bayer trademark name for acetylsalicylic acid in about 80 countries, including Canada where you will find both generic "ASA tablets" and others carrying the Aspirin trademark because the trademark owned by Bayer is still recognized there.

Genericization typically occurs over a period of time because: 1) in which a mark is not used as a trademark (i.e., where it is not used to exclusively identify the products or services of a particular business) 2) where a mark falls into disuse entirely or 3) where the trademark owner does not enforce its rights through actions for passing off or trademark infringement.

Trademark owners may consider developing a generic term for the product to be used in descriptive contexts, to avoid inappropriate use of the "house" mark. Such a term is called a generic descriptor. Examples: "Kleenex tissues" ("facial tissues" being the generic descriptor) or "Velcro brand fasteners" for Velcro brand name hook-and-loop fasteners.

It is often difficult to stop genericide, though companies such as Johnson & Johnson's effort to protect their Band-Aid product not to be used with any similar product.

Google has tried to prevent the term 'googling' in reference to Web searches, but the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary have both noted the widespread use of the verb coinage and yet still defining "google" (all lower case) as a verb meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."

I recall examples of companies issuing lawsuits for one dollar to prevent the genericization of a core trademark. The Xerox corporation tried extensive public relations campaigns to push the use of "photocopy" as a verb, rather than the generic "xerox." They were successful, but part of that comes from the fact that there became so many other copier companies that the shorter "copy" is now the most common verb used.

You will find new examples in the news all the time. Adobe Systems doesn't want their trademarked product, Photoshop, used as "photoshopped" to mean a modified image.

Source: wikipedia.org

Brand Names and Generic Nouns and Verbs

Do you call any small adhesive bandage a band-aid? Do you call a paper facial tissue a kleenex? If so, you are using a brand as a generic noun.

Band-Aid is a brand name of Johnson & Johnson's line of adhesive bandages and has been used since the 1920s. Kleenex is the brand name for a variety of paper-based products, such as facial tissue, bathroom tissue, paper towels, tampons, and diapers. It has also been in usage since the 1920s and is now part of Kimberly-Clark.

Some brand names become the vernacular word for an entire category. Going back to when a category emerges, sometimes one brand is dominant and so becomes the generic. Such was the case for refrigerators. 60 years ago it was fairly common for people to call any refrigerator a "fridge." That might seem like a shortening of refrigerator, but it actually was a shortening of the Frigidaire brand which early on dominated the market.

Some of these generic nouns are more likely to be used by an older generation that grew up hearing them. Would a young child say fridge, kleenex or band-aid? If so, it was probably learned from a parent or grandparent.

Is this a good thing for a brand? Yes and no. It certainly gets a brand name out into the public consciousness. The usage probably indicates, at some point in time, a dominance in the market. But when people use your brand name but actually are referring to (or purchasing!) another company's product, that weakens your brand and trademark. Generic nouns drop the capitalization of a product and at least that should distinguish that usage from the actual brand.

In the mid-20th century, the brand Xerox became the generic term for a photocopy. "I only have a xerox of the invoice." It even was used for a time as a verb for the process - "Make me a xerox of this document." The Xerox corporation was once fairly well known for opposing this usage and would contact publications that used lowercase "xerox" as a noun or verb and did not mean an actual Xerox copy or copy machine made by their company. That is required for trademark protection, and it can become a legal issue. Nowadays, with many other copiers in the market, it is likely that we would simply say "make a copy of this document." You might say that this indicates that the Xerox brand dominance has diminished.

The word "dumpster"goes back to 1935 when the Dempster-Dumpster system of mechanically loading the contents of standardized containers onto garbage trucks was patented by Dempster Brothers.

The actual containers were called Dumpsters (capital D) which was a blend word of the verb "dump" and the company's name. The company also made the Dempster Dumpmaster, which was the first successful front-loading garbage truck.

No doubt you have seen these trucks and these containers and have used the word as a genericized trademark. But most companies try hard to protect a trademark so that the word is used for their own products and services. It is a tough cultural battle. Generic nouns have a life of their own and often spread like a meme.

Some generic brand name nouns also are used as verbs. Such was the case with Xerox and in more modern usage, it is the case with Google. Way back in the late 1990s before Google was even a company, co-founder Larry Page used the word as a verb meaning "to search." This was when the search engine was still located at google.stanford.edu.

At one time, you might have said you were going to "google it" when you were actually going to search online using Yahoo, AltaVista or any one of the other competing search engines. But Google's search dominance is so great that today it's very likely that the person is using Google to google (search). In 2003, the American Dialect Society called google a transitive verb, and the Oxford English Dictionary made it official in June 2006.