What's up with "no copy blue"? 10 Jul 2007

[dropzone]

@Powers

“Xerox” is not a verb!

It is now. Funny how language works. Heck, “Xerox” wasn’t a word until the 1950s.

I realize they may not be as scary a threat as the Disney folks, but they still don’t like it when you genericize their trademark.

“Genericize”? Who’s verbifying now? Anyway, I capitalized it, which is all the lawyers would ask. And I sent copies (not to be confused with Xeroxes) to my contacts at Xerox months ago and they didn’t make a peep, so, despite the demonstrated scariness of Xerox’s lawyers (below that of Disney lawyers, but not by much), I’m taking their silence as their acceptance.

[Cassie_In_The_Attic]

@jeffreykopp

Oops, that’s right; dropped the link while mashing about logging in.

I presume to keep people from “recycling” expired insurance cards by editing the image of one.

It’s an elegantly subtle technique, probably exploiting some deficiency in the light tube/sensor combination common to consumer scanners, though to be sure, I’d have to fire up an oooold model to see if some provision was built into this one to accommodate such anti-counterfeiting measures.

I recall a couple decades ago, a chocolate-colored ribbon (Selectric?) was developed to be used on darker brown paper, to frustrate photocopying. It was awkward.

I also read that the first office Xerox (the one with the curved glass and the three knobs) made a slight reduction; it was said to be done out of some concern over copyright, though I later wondered if that was just a story to cover a design limitation. But I’m old enough to recall that over time, recopied phone lists would gradually shrink in size (this model remained in common into the early 1970s).

The shrinkage was not due to copyright, but because of problems within the machine: Excess toner would to build up into a ridge along the edge of the paper whenever you copied a sheet that had dark edges. To solve this, they created a margin so all the excess toner would land on the paper and leave with it. But now you weren’t copying to the edges, so they made 98% width copies to get all the marginalia.

PowersThis is a common misconception. There is no law against using xerox as a verb, nor spelling it with a small letter.
They don’t like that their name was “verbed”, but they are only allowed to discourage such use-they have no legal recourse to such use. Unless you are putting it into competative ads. And then the onus is on them to prove that they suffered, which tactic has failed when it’s obvious they just got free publicity.

[dropzone]

That ain’t necessarily so, Cassie. (By the way, welcome to the SDMB!) The Federal Trademark Dilution Act of 1995 gave companies more recourse to fight the “genericide” of their trademarks via their dilution, in this case the blurring of distinction between the fine products of Xerox and the crap made by its competitors, like Canon. In 2006 Congress strengthened the earlier act by making the mere possibility of dilution a cause for action against the violator.

In a Staff Report from long ago, our own Ian said this about it:

Sure, we might think the highest achievement of a successful product is, in fact, for consumers to think of their name before all others, but while companies spend billions to ensure that their products become “household names,” they then spend millions more to prevent these household names from being applied to any products beside their own. Two products you mention, Coca-Cola and Xerox, are probably the best-known examples of contemporary products going to great lengths to fight this fight. Coke has won lawsuits against restaurants who serve another brand of cola when their customers ask for a Coke, although they did lose the proprietary right to the name “cola,” because it’s descriptive of the product.

[Powers]

@Cassie In The Attic

PowersThis is a common misconception. There is no law against using xerox as a verb, nor spelling it with a small letter.

I didn’t say there was a law; I said they didn’t like it. =)

It also happens to grate on me personally; it’s not a common thing where I come from, and in fact I only became aware of the generic usage in the last few years via the Internet.
Powers &8^]

[DSYoungEsq]

@Powers

I didn’t say there was a law; I said they didn’t like it. =)

It also happens to grate on me personally; it’s not a common thing where I come from, and in fact I only became aware of the generic usage in the last few years via the Internet.
Powers &8^]

With respect, I went to college in Rochester, NY, back in the 70’s, and even then you “xeroxed” a thing when you copied it. Probably more strong a usage back then, expecially given that you couldn’t copy an item using your fax cum scanner cum printer to do it.

Xerox obviously would prefer that people used the term “Xerox” solely when talking about their own products. They have, however, lost that battle a long time ago. :eek:

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@DSYoungEsq

With respect, I went to college in Rochester, NY, back in the 70’s, and even then you “xeroxed” a thing when you copied it.

However, I bet you could be shot for genericizing any of Eastman Kodaks product names. OTOH, by the 70s both “Kodak” and “Brownie” had stopped being used to describe any cheap camera and there’s not much you can do to genericize Ektachrome, Plus-X, or Super Panchro-Press.

[DSYoungEsq]

Well, first of all, I don’t recall anyone calling just any old camera a kodak. As in, “I’m running down to the photography store and buying a kodak from Canon.” But in the mid-'70s, there weren’t too many competitors to the Instamatics that I recall.

By comparison, people DID tend to use polaroid generically to describe photos that self-developed. Whether or not there were competitors to that process, I’m not certain; I was young in the '70s and didn’t pay attention.

[dropzone]

The genericization of “kodak” ended before either of us were born, at least in the US. But my wife calls Polaroids “Instamatics,” incurring the supernatural wrath of both George Eastman and Edwin Land.