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posted by CoolHand on Monday August 21 2017, @09:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-duck-it dept.

Is the term "google" too generic and therefore unworthy of its trademark protection? That's the question before the US Supreme Court.

Words like teleprompter, thermos, hoover, aspirin, and videotape were once trademarked. They lost the status after their names became too generic and fell victim to what is known as "genericide."

What's before the Supreme Court is a trademark lawsuit that Google already defeated in a lower court. The lawsuit claims that Google should no longer be trademarked because the word "google" is synonymous to the public with the term "search the Internet."

"There is no single word other than google that conveys the action of searching the Internet using any search engine," according to the petition to the Supreme Court.

It's perhaps one of the most consequential trademark case before the justices since they ruled in June that offensive trademarks must be allowed.

Source: Ars Technica


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  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday August 22 2017, @04:59AM (3 children)

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Tuesday August 22 2017, @04:59AM (#557387) Homepage Journal

    Sure you can. I knew you could.

    They've managed to hang on to their trademark and the word "xerox" has been a generic term for decades.

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  • (Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Tuesday August 22 2017, @04:48PM (2 children)

    by Rivenaleem (3400) on Tuesday August 22 2017, @04:48PM (#557566)

    But you can "photocopy" something. There's still an alternative single word to describe the action. You can "Vacuum the carpets" instead of Hoovering them. I think using the argument that "there's no other single word to describe the activity" is not the fault of the trademark owner, but the fault of the language in question. Have the plaintiffs exhausted every single language to ensure that there's none with an equivalent word for "search the internet".

    If you want to generify a trademark, then I think you need a better argument.

    • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday August 22 2017, @05:35PM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Tuesday August 22 2017, @05:35PM (#557594) Homepage

      > Have the plaintiffs exhausted every single language to ensure that there's none with an equivalent word for "search the internet".

      Other than, you know, "search the internet" or more accurately, "search the web"

      The canonical case is aspirin, where it is literally impossible to sell your medicine as acetylsalicylic acid.

      Sure, you can manufacture acetylsalicylic acid and market acetylsalicylic acid, but no one is going to buy it. Everyone knows aspiring, no one knows acetylsalicylic acid. Therefore it is literally impossible for an acetylsalicylic acid maker to exist without nullifying the aspiring trademark.

      Neither Xerox nor Google suffer from the same problem. People know what a photocopier or a search engine is. No one is going to say "What's a search engine? Oh, you mean a Google!".

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    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday August 22 2017, @06:15PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday August 22 2017, @06:15PM (#557608) Journal

      I think using the argument that "there's no other single word to describe the activity" is not the fault of the trademark owner, but the fault of the language in question. Have the plaintiffs exhausted every single language to ensure that there's none with an equivalent word for "search the internet".

      Suppose we want to add such a word. Who gets to create and define it? There's no standards body for the English language. The only definition of the language is how people speak it, so if people use "Google" as a synonym for "Search the web", then Google IS a synonym for search the web. So the language does now have a single word to describe that activity, and that word is "Google".

      If you want to avoid that, we could either establish an official standards organization for our language that is specifically required to defend the trademarks of private corporations...or we could remove the restriction that prevents trademarking a generic term. Frankly, I think both of those "solutions" would be worse than the problem.

      It's not the fault of the trademark owner, sure. But it's also not the fault of the general public either. Why should we be required to halt the evolution of the English language just to please the executives at Google? The industry -- which Google is certainly a part of -- did not give us a good enough word to describe the technology they created, so we made our own. That's our language working as intended.

      If you want to generify a trademark, then I think you need a better argument.

      Legally, the only argument that you really need is that people use it generically. But having no better word would certainly lead to people using the trademark generically. So it's not a valid legal argument by itself, but it IS a root cause. And as the top search provider, Google would be the organization most capable of stopping this by creating and using a new generic term. This is similar to LEGO -- go to pretty much any website with a comment section discussing LEGO and you'll see fanboys pointing out that the company is always LEGO, never Lego; and the product is LEGO bricks not LEGOs or Legos. That's prevention of genericization, and they've gotten their fans to do it on behalf of the company. That's what Google needs. Hammer home the point that it's not "Googling" but "Google web search" or whatever. Pound that drum until you can't read a news article about Google without someone pointing that out. Plenty of companies have done it; why give Google a pass?