- List of generic and genericized trademarks
- “prior art”
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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New Rules (proposals of laws that will fix problems)
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Inspired by Bill Maher’s “New Rules” segment of his show, but not as satire. Some satire is perhaps welcome but this is like a serious bug tracker for the real world (not bugs in software apps).
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That page refers to the reverse scenario, where the word is first invented as a trademark and the product became the common generic term. That’s a different problem. The public at least has the option to use the generic term, and they should, so as not to promote a particular supplier. So I say “aramid” not “Kevlar®” because I certainly do not want to promote Dupont.
The big injustice is when a project in the commons like Gemini loses their branding because Google hostily just takes it.
- as in, we’ve done it before and we can do it again – corporations can trademark all they want, but once a term has become genericized, it loses its legal “protection”
- and they have less of a foot to stand on this time because they’re trying to trademark an existing generic term (prior art)
IIUC, you’re saying there is no problem to begin with because a community FOSS project can simply use the trademarked term without concern for the corp enforcing the trademark on the word they hi-jacked. I’m not convinced, but let’s assume that’s true. It’s not the problem I’m exposing. The Gemini project may get away with continued use of the term Gemini, but the damage is done in Google’s act of overloading the term, moving their own definition to position #1 in the dictionary (in effect) and in fact erasing/obsoleting the original meaning because when someone searches for “Gemini” they only see Google’s abusive use of the term. Google has suppressed an idea through sabotage of the language. Even if Google does not sue the Gemini project, the damage is done.
That is not the purpose of trademarks and no generic term should be eligible for trademark protection.
Hence why it is legal for one to make an Elon Musk gay porn site called x.gay and fill it with Deep fakes of Elon Musk having lots of gay sex and doing enough Search Engine Optimization that it is the first result when someone google searches for X
That is not the purpose of trademarks
The purpose of trademarks is to mitigate confusion in the marketplace. But now that we have corporations using trademarks in a way that creates confusion and ultimately smothers their branding on language outside the marketplace, trademark has a problem in its current implementation.
and no generic term should be eligible for trademark protection.
I wouldn’t call this is a trademark protection¹ proposal; it’s a trademark limitation. Meta was never trademarked before FB sabotaged the word. In any case, I don’t see a fix mentioned in your comment. A technology called Gemini was founded in 2019 that threatens Google’s reach, who does not benefit from people using a web alternative that’s less conducive to surveillance advertising. So Google steals the name for their own branding. How does that benefit the public interest?
¹ w.r.t copyright, all creators get an automatic copyright without registration. What registration gives them is a bit of proof that could be useful in litigation. I don’t know if trademarks respect the same concept but apparently not. There is significant proof that Gemini was used in 2019 but whatever non-profit entity produced it, they apparently did not register a trademark. That’s part of the problem. Perhaps non-profits should get gratis trademark registration service.
Trademarks outside of direct brand/company names used exclusively in commercial market places provide no social benefit and should be banned entirely.
Yeah it is shitty when companies use common terms and flood the conversation but expanding trademark rights creates more problems than solutions.
And in Gemini's case, it may have accidentally prevented an Eternal September for the smolNet. It isn't going to go away and slow growth will enable its cultural values to be better preserved.