Green Jello sang that “3 Little Pigs” rock/rap fusion song.
Didn’t they also get into trouble for using Rambo as a character in the song/video?
When I was growing up, my father was a customer service engineer for IBM. He repaired photocopiers. We, at least, NEVER referred to one of those machines as a Xerox. It was a cardinal sin, and we were even trained so well that we corrected our friends when they dared to refer to it as a Xerox instead of a photocopy.
But I do know that we called everything coke (intentionally left uncapitalized). So while we defended the right of other companies to make copiers and not have them called Xeroxes, we didn’t seem to care as much for the cola companies. 
Most big trucks have an engine brake to help slow the truck down without overheating the regular brakes. The most popular company to make them was Jacobs and they are called Jake Brakes by almost everybody. Since engine brakes are loud some towns had signs that read “no Jake brakes” until Jacobs sued them and made them change it to “no engine brakes”
Cecil’s covered 'em.
What are “jake brakes” and why are they prohibited in some locations?
It says pretty much the same thing as jimshep mentioned, but in greater detail.
Irishman:
Read those ads they put in the writer’s magazines. They DO ask you to use those stilted constructions, and most emphatically DO NOT want you to use “Kleenex” as a substitute for “tissue”, whether capitalized or not (or whether only referring to their product or not). It’s enough to make you want to (in the words of Dave Barry) consume large amounts of carbonated malt beverage.
I have just returned from lunch with the latest (Sept. 2000) issue of Writer’s Digest. On page 51 is a FULL-Page add for Kleenex. It rads:
“To all of the writers and typists and proofreaders and editors who help us to protect our trademark Kleenex ® by always starting it with a capital K followed by l-e-e-n-e-xc and following it with a proper generic, be it tissue or diapers: Kimberley-Clark says Bless you!”
So the word from the Kleenex people themselves is that you can’t get away with just capitalizing “Kleenex”.
(The ad on the preceding page from Rollerblade ends up with “This message comes to you courtesy of our attorneys, who are correctly referred to a “extraordinarily anal.”” Good to see humor under these circumstances).
Elsewhere: “Gore-Tex should never stand alone. Always use it to modify a noun, such as Gore-Tex® fabric, Gore-Tex® gloves, Gore-Tex® outerware.”
It’s not as stilted as it might be, but it’s still not the way eople talk. I just had to bring it to the notice of the Straight Dope ® brand answer-and-wisecracking-column website Message Board.
Oh, yeah – I KNOW why the companies do this sort of thing. But I still don’t think that a company with the economic clout of Coca Cola is really worried abut losing its copyrighted names.
“Rollerblade”, “Rollerblading”, & even (I think) “Rollerhockey” are trademarked names that are often used more generically. The correct term in “Inline Skating” (unles of course you are using Rollerblade brand Inline Skates).
CalMeacham, I see your point. However, it strikes me in the instance mentioned of Kleenex, Kleenex actually makes more products than just tissues. Thus the justification to include the product with the brand name.
And you’re right, most people don’t talk that way. However, formal writing has its own requirements.
As for Coca-Cola, they did lose the right to trademark the word “cola”. “Coke” is one they are fighting to protect, even though it is very often used as a generic, at least regionally. So yes, I would say they are worried.
Just think if Pepsi managed to argue that “coke” was an equivalent generic for soda or pop or carbonated beverage because millions of Americans use it that way in common parlance. You don’t think Pepsi would be happy for that?
(In fact I just had lunch and they gave me a Pepsi when I ordered Coke. Grrrr.)
Xerox spend lots of dough educating consumers in the 70’s for the end of differentiating “Xeroxes” and “copiers”. The aim was simple: if all copiers become “Xeroxes”, then consumers will not be able to differentiate their product from the competition. Xeroxes marketing aims, etc, will all be to promote “copiers” instead of Xeroxes, and marketing dollars are wasted.
Lots of companies that had completely original products failed to differentiate their product from other competitors, and had “me-too” products take over their market. Case in point: Escalator.
Hmmm… “Escalator” was a tradename? I wonder what the approved generic term was: “Escalator-brand moving mechanical staircase”?
Around here, we have moving mechanical staircases from Otis, Kone, and Mitsubishi, (and somewhere downtown I’m sure I saw one by Hyundai).
In Toronto, it’s “copier”, not “Xerox”.
“Pop”, and, formally (as on menus), “soft drink”.
On packaging and in formal usage, “cola”, not “Coke” --but I sometimes find myself asking for a “Coke” when I mean a “cola”, and am often met with something like “we only have Pepsi”.
Have there been any documented cases where the former tradename, liberated into the language by common usage, has in fact obliterated a previous generic name
As I already pointed out, common use does not liberate a trademark. Trademarks do get genericized but, in virtually every case, long before then they have already wiped out the generic, usually because it was a multi-word phrase.
You already talked about one: escalator (former generic “moving stairs”). And when’s the last time you used a Dewar flask? Perhaps you could answer better if I called it by its former brand name of thermos.
Other’s (most of which I don’t remember or know the former generic) are zipper, windbreaker, kerosene, brassiere (“ladies’ support garment”), granola, heroin, yo-yo (“return top”), and trampoline. This is nowhere near a complete list.
dtilque posted:
Heroin??? :eek: So if I’m a doctor I can demonstrate medical need and prescribe a bottle of Heroin-brand… what? Sleep aid? Pain-killer?
Are any of these still used as trademarks by the originating companies?
Sunspace,
You were asking about former trademarks that have become generic, and that’s what I was providing in that article.
There’s two different categories under discussion here. First we were talking about trademarks that are commonly used generically, even though they have not lost their trademark status. And then someone brought up the case of ecalator, which used to be a trademark but has lost that status. This is a smaller group than the former, although there’s still a fair number in it.
Being a trademark is an absolute. A word can’t be both a generic or a trademark. Usually a court case is required to move a trademark to generic status, nothing can make a generic into a trademark. I say usually, because there are times when a company decides not to enforce their trademark. For instance, in 1980, IBM declared “PC” to be a trademark. I think for a while they tried to enforce it, but probably decided that it wasn’t worth it. After all, it was a questionable situation as the acronym had been in use for several years at that time.
There’s no law against saying, writing or carving in stone that “this is just a xerox of that”.
Yes, the Xerox people can send you a note, but you are under no obligation to care.
So, why do they do it?
Because if they didn’t, they would run the risk of seeing “Buy a Cannon xerox machine today!” on some billboard.
When that happens, they have to prove in court that they tried to prevent the “generic” use of the term.
It’s still no actual obligation on you, or your newspaper or publishing company. Your editor will usually try to correct it though, just because they hate to get any kind of mail from lawyers. They get enough real threats over minor things like sharp movie review that they just get lawyer-shy.
Sunspace,
Here is a link to a Bayer ad from the 1890s that mentions that you can send away for free samples of Heroin. I wonder if that’s where modern drug pushers got the idea of letting you have the first hit for free? There is also a mention of Aspirin, which is touted as a “substitute for salicylates.” Whatever those are.
Hmm, okay. I guess this trademark defense is both a demonstration of the company’s interest in the mark, and a kind of CYA manoeuvre for when something goes wrong.
As for the heroin, I looked at the site. Seems that it was as pervasive as alcohol now… but at least I now have some idea what it does.
One word: JELL-O(beat that)
Here in good 'ol Melbourne Auu-straaalia, I use:
photocopy, jelly (as in the dessert), tissue, (kleenex makes me cringe every time I hear it…) zip, soft drink (likewise, pop makes me cring) and lemonade (instead of 7up or similar)
But also coke, aspirin, icy-pole (popsicle, in the US, I believe… an “icypole” is an actual product here, but actually, now that I think about it, I haven’t seen one for ages, and a similar product came out by the same company with a different name. Maybe they lost a similar suit.) and band-aid.
Odd how different global locations influence how these words are used, some probably due to how we never get the latest technology for some time so we have to refer to 'em as the generic term until they get here, and by the time they do, we’ve already got the terms for them…
Interesting use of lemonade. That word has a specific meaning here in the U.S. for the standard lemon-juice drink with sugar. And the versions of 7-up and Sprite tout themselves as lemon-lime flavored. So I suppose we could call them carbonized lemon-limeades. But really, who wants to say all that? Lemon-lime sodas is generic.
You use jelly for gelatin? Interesting.
Icy-pole. Just wanted to say Icypole. 
Sounds unpleasant.
Irishman:
If you want a Really interesting uswe of “lemonade” then check out the book “For God, Country, and Coca-Cola”, a history of Coca Cola. Apparently in France the generic term for soft drinks was “limonades”, so Coca Cola was classified as a lemonade in France, even though it contained no lemon juice (although it apparently did, and still does, contain lemon oil). The Coca Cola people worked long and hard to change this.