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
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday August 21 2017, @10:15PM (2 children)
Nullify Disney: "There is no single word other than Disney that conveys the mass offer of taking your money to entertain your kids"
Nullify Apple: "There is no single word other than Apple that conveys the mass offer of taking your money to entertain your ego"
Nullify Uber: "There is no single word other than Uber that conveys the action of being assholes while providing individual transportation services"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @10:01AM (1 child)
Except that nobody uses "Disney" except for referring to the company. Have you ever heard someone say something like "I will disney this stuff"? Similar arguments also hold for Apple and Uber, except that here the situation is a bit more complicated, since both are common words; the protection is that they are not commonly used in their common meaning in the context of the respective products (e.g. I might say "I eat an apple", but then I'm not referring to a computer, a smartphone, etc.). If Apple were selling fruits, they probably would have a hard time maintaining trademark protection.
(Score: 2) by lx on Tuesday August 22 2017, @01:33PM
it's used as a verb. [dictionary.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Murdoc on Monday August 21 2017, @10:15PM (17 children)
Since I very rarely use google anymore (privacy concerns, do no evil, etc.), I've made a conscious effort not to use the term "google" as a verb meaning "search the internet", and instead usually say something like "do a search online", or something similar. Or I specifically mention other sites, like WIkipedia or IMDB. I know it's not as convenient, but I hate giving companies free advertising (so I also try not to say kleenex, xerox, etc.). And who knows, maybe one day someone will ask me why I didn't just say "google", and I'll be able to tell them. I've already broken a couple of my friends and family from using google. Probably just spitting in the wind but you gotta start somewhere.
(Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Monday August 21 2017, @10:19PM (7 children)
I binged it!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @11:17PM
#fail
Sorry :(
It just is not the same.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 21 2017, @11:19PM (1 child)
That's great. One of the Big Three privacy invasion companies in the world, in competition with Google, and you choose their search engine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @11:51PM
:-)
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday August 22 2017, @12:15AM
I AltaVistad "I binged it!" but the results were compiled by a bunch of Yahoos!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @02:56AM (1 child)
Does binged rhyme with hinged or winged?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 22 2017, @03:54AM
Depends on how hard you use it.
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(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 22 2017, @06:35PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfHuZ5qrYX4
Don't worry - it's curable, you can come back onto the one true search path:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-OKTNYALgk
However, MS didn't learn, and they tried it again:
http://splinternews.com/i-found-the-one-huge-flaw-in-the-smash-hit-get-out-1793859139
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday August 21 2017, @10:30PM
Google will Hoover your Excel sheets even if you hide your Zip disks in Ziplocs behind the Fridge.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Osamabobama on Monday August 21 2017, @11:27PM (6 children)
I get the impression that when people talk of googling something, they literally mean that they are going to use Google to search for it. That strikes me more as market penetration than generification. Probably the opposite of generic, in fact.
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(Score: 2) by Murdoc on Monday August 21 2017, @11:43PM (1 child)
I know too many people that don't know the difference between "google" and "search engine". Many don't even know it's a website, since they just type their query into the url bar. If they are not aware of their choices, they can't make informed choices.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday August 22 2017, @04:24AM
These are the same people who thought the "Internet" was the big blue E.
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Tuesday August 22 2017, @12:52AM (3 children)
I've also never heard anybody say "Google that on Yahoo" or "I am going to Google for a place to eat on Yelp." Every time I've heard somebody use Google as a verb, they literally mean "I am going to use a service operated by Google." So it seems silly to assert it's generic. I have sometimes heard people use "To Photoshop" in a generic way to mean any kind of image editing, regardless of specific tools used. But that makes sense, since there were actual shops that sold photo related services before there was Adobe PhotoShop image editing software for Windows and Macintosh. Somebody unfamiliar with the tool would understand it has something to do with photos. "Google" wasn't a word associated with networks or searching or looking things up before the company. Maybe in another 10 years, it'll become more like Xerox where the brand name really did become generic in common parlance as a result of market dominance, but I haven't seen in happening.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday August 22 2017, @04:08PM (2 children)
I know people who use "Google" as a generic -- even saying they'll "Google it" and then they go ask Siri or Alexa.
I even fall into it myself sometimes, although I try to avoid it...I'm so anti-google I block 'em at the firewall...but "Duck-duck-go it" is rather awkward and not commonly understood, and "do an Internet search for it" is a bit lengthy..."Google it" is by far the most concise way I know of to get that point across. But I'd love some better alternatives if anyone has one...
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday August 22 2017, @07:08PM
Some of us are using "duck it" (or "duck that"), if you bark it you only have to explain it once.. kinda like how "google it" got established :)
Then again "search [for] it" works quite well for me when not caring about which engine people use.
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Tuesday August 22 2017, @08:16PM
I think "do an Internet search" is no longer necessary because if you say "search for the battle of Madagascar" nobody is going to assume that you mean to immediately drive to a physical library and start digging through paper index cards in the card catalog drawers, nor that they should start lifting up their sofa cushions to see if it's hiding with loose change. The Internet has become sufficiently ubiquitous that it's just implicit whenever you are looking for information, unless you specify a specific book or something like that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @07:34AM
The problem with that is that someone is going to try using Bing and end up with the only search results being links to Office 365.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @12:04AM (6 children)
Do we want the legal president set that makes it all but impossible to trademark names because the name became part of the public lexicon? No company would dare engage in trademarks again if all that had to happen was the general public started using it as slang and you no longer have a trademark.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @01:17AM
Evidently, Americans want the illegal president, or at least the "honor his heritage" Nazi sympathizing one. Not that this should be taken as any kind of precedent, because Lindberg did it first.
(Score: 1) by Beau Slim on Tuesday August 22 2017, @02:43AM (1 child)
"legal president"? Was that a Freudian slip, or does your auto-correct have a political bias? Don't get me wrong--I'm fed up too!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @03:09AM
Audit the Fed!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @06:12AM
Oh my, how terrible. I'd be heartbroken if that happened. Truly, a disaster of the highest order.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @10:10AM
The legal precedent is already there. Look no further than the second paragraph of the summary to learn more.
Apparently it didn't stop companies from engaging in trademarks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @01:41PM
I doubt that. If a trademark becomes generic it usually means the product behind it has great market dominance, which is what the company really wants. Any smart company would still be in great shape even after loosing their trademark. I'd rather have 90% market dominance and loose my trademark than to have only a small percentage and a protected name.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday August 22 2017, @01:14AM
It's called Estoppel. It's not like patents or copyrights; the burden of protection is on the trademark holder.
They've been calling search "google it" ever since google got to be cool to the slashdot crown. I feel the plaintiff should win.
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(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday August 22 2017, @04:59AM (3 children)
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.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Tuesday August 22 2017, @04:48PM (2 children)
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
> 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
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.
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?
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday August 22 2017, @08:26AM
Oh? Maybe they should duck it [duckduckgo.com]
(Btw, soylent url-linker strips %22 (double quote))
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday August 22 2017, @02:57PM
Well, if the have to change the name, maybe it could become the originally intended Googol?