I was going to say "found the Velcro employee"-- excuse me, I meant "employee of the company Velcro BVBA"-- but surely a Velcro employee would know that Velcro BVBA makes Velcro-branded hook-and-loop-fastener cable management products.
I was just poking fun at Velcro's absurdity. I in no way endorse their view of their branding. I just saw someone say Velcro and I never have had an opportunity to share that lovely page. Seemed tangentially relevant.
Wait, dumpster is trademarked? I've never heard of this before, but according to [0] it is definitely a generic trademark. Although this may be a great example of why VELCRO(R) is fighting a losing battle. At this point, it may be too late to change the average consumer's habits, as VELCRO(R) is in almost the same situation. Perhaps if they had started this campaign when the patent expired and generic alternatives appeared, but it's probably too little, too late at this point.
Sure. Famous inventor, George Roby Dempster.
The Dempster Dumpmaster was the truck built to go with the Dempster Dumpster, using a hydraulic fork system that picks up the Dumpster and empties it into the truck. Dempster invented that, and sold garbage trucks and compatible containers.
Once the patents expired, it's was a de-facto standard.
A "dumpster" is thus historically a container that can be emptied by a standard front fork loading garbage truck. Long containers that are towed onto a tilt-bed truck are something else, usually debris boxes. But they now tend to be called "roll-on dumpsters".
> Long containers that are towed onto a tilt-bed truck are something else, usually debris boxes. But they now tend to be called "roll-on dumpsters".
Isn't that also called a skip? The wiki page for trash skips says that the term is more of a British/Australian/New Zealand english thing[1], but I've definitely heard people call them skips in the US.
IMO all of these are too generic and should loose trademark status (without a specific additional context phrase such as X BRAND indicating it's actually the brand and not the type of product).
A Very Short Introduction” of a man in 1990 who filed for a trademark on his red, white and blue assortment of “Stealth Condoms”, with the tag-phrase “They’ll never see you coming.” Northrop, the maker of the B-2 “stealth bomber”, sued to stop him, claiming that the man had purloined and even harmed the reputation of their trademark. He went bust.
This is wild.
It's perfectly logical what they're doing but I'm used to seeing this kinda thing after the trademark has lapsed (Kleenex, Xerox, etc). But to see a company release a pretty funny youtube video begging you to say their name less, well, it's just a weird thing to see.
I don't think trademarks can lapse in the US and many other countries (copyright can; which is a huge debate in an of itself: see Disney).
I actually use "tissue" and "copy", but those kinda make sense. Personally I hate it when people keep saying "I Googled..." because it reminds me of this bullshit search engine monoculture we have right now (I try to use DuckDuckGo more, but I miss the days of Yahoo, Lycos, Hotbot, Dogpile, Excite and how they all give you DIFFERENT results!)
Velcro though ... totally didn't even realize it was a brand until like just now .. and I'm still going to use it generically, because it should just be at this point. :-P
No, "velcro" is genericized. The capitalized word "Velcro" is still a trademark.
As such, you can buy "Velcro [BVBA] velcro", or you can call 3M's hook-and-loop fasteners "3M velcro". 3M, naturally, avoids using the term "velcro" in its packaging and marketing, and would never use "Velcro", because even though they could, because the term is genericized, it would still be free advertising for a competitor.
The capitalized word "Velcro" is still a trademark.
Capitalization has no bearing on word marks (in the US, at least. I can't speak for other countries). "Velcro", "VELCRO", "velcro" are all the same thing as far as the trademark office is concerned. And yes, there are still active trademarks for the word "VELCRO", but it has still been unquestionably genericized.
I think there's mismatch here between you and the parent in that, yes the "VELCRO" trademark is genericised in public use but _officially_ the trademarks are still registered and valid so in law they are not [yet] genericised.
In the UK I can go in to shops the length of the country and ask for velcro and get "hook and eye" or "fabric fastener", is a completely generic term now, just no one wants to fight it in court.
The rules of English grammar supersede those of the trademark office. If it's not a proper noun, and not the first word in a sentence, don't capitalize it.
As an example of all-caps trademark, LEGO bricks. Like velcro, LEGO is a portmanteau. Velcro is velour-crochet, and LEGO is leg-godt ("play good"). And like velcro before it, LEGO is now fighting genericization.
If they lose the struggle, kids will play with legos instead of LEGO bricks. They might be legos made by Lego then, but LEGO would be the trademark. It might not be relevant to the word mark, but the image mark is stylized in all caps.
This is nitpicky, but I am sharing some of my experience from writing software that produces brand reports for trademark lawyers. The USPTO might not be case-sensitive, but some of the lawyers are very case-oversensitive, so our software had to take that into account. I still have trouble using a trademark as a noun or verb.
You can lose your trademark protection if the term becomes genericized and you fail to police its use. It's exceedingly rare for this to happen, the law isn't clear-cut, and different courts have ruled differently in similar cases, but it is technically possible. Velcro doesn't have to rabidly attack everyone trying to genericize its brand, and so long as they are still using it themselves and making some occasional effort to legally defend it, they're fine. But if other brands started calling their products "velcro" in the generic sense, and Velcro ignored it for a decade or more, they could in fact lose the trademark entirely.
Ah, thanks for mentioning it's a funny video. With just the link posted, it just looks like a typical "say it our way so we don't lose the trademark" thing like [1]. It makes a big difference in the decision to click on it.
> If the LEGO trademark is used at all, it should always be used as an adjective, not as a noun. For example, say “MODELS BUILT OF LEGO BRICKS”. Never say “MODELS BUILT OF LEGOs”.
I'm assuming my down votes are for the link being off-topic. Just wanted to apologize if I annoyed some people with it. I thought it would be fun to share it since Velcro doesn't come up very often in online discussions.
It's alright. One of the things that separates discussion on HN from other sites is that we like to try to stay on-topic. In the past I've witnessed many articles on Slashdot go from discussing the article with the first two or three comments to somehow having a 100-comment discussion of the merits of Open Source and Linux. This would happen even on discussions of some new science or new widget. Inevitably there would be some derogatory comment about Microsoft in there regardless of the content of the original article.
As a consequence I try to avoid mentioning things that will go in a political direction, like Trademark, Copyright, etc. as these terms tend to be very charged for certain people. Once you bring it up people will dogpile the discussion and eventually your article on the Lost Art of Lacing Cable is full of comments about how Trademarks are stupid and Copyright is Copywrong.
It's not really about relevance, but rather that the main focus of the comment is something that invites a lot of political discussion with very little substance.
Innocent though it might have been, we were discussing tying cables together, someone dared to mention the word "Velcro", and out comes Captain Pedantic to remind us that it is a trademarked term. Hey, we were trying to discuss cables, not trademark law. You also don't know that parent wasn't specifically calling out the Velcro brand: "buy the Velcro ties, not the shitty off-brand, Velcro; I used the word for a reason."
That's my guess, I don't necessarily hold that view. But it did drag the conversation in a vastly different direction. :-)
The problem is when the either the brand becomes so dominant ("Kleenex(tm) facial tissues") or the item really lacks an easy, generic noun (Velcro(tm) "hook-and-loop-fasteners". Yeah.)
Escalator(tm) ... motorized staircase?
Trampoline(tm) ... spring jumping pads? Oh, "Rebound tumbler".
Dry Ice(tm) ... solid carbon dioxide?
Dumpster (tm - who knew?) ... large dump-able garbage bins? Bet they really don't like Dumpster(tm)-diving or Dumpster(tm)-fires.
And patents exacerbate this "problem" behavior, because for for the life of the patent (17+ years) the product class is uniquely associated with the brand, so there's no need for anyone to use a generic term (Velcro(tm), Aspirin(tm) acetylsalicylic acid, Xerox(tm) photo-copies).
So the lesson is, when you create your innovative new product, don't just give it a catchy name, also give it a catchy descriptive name, and make sure you promote both.
If you don't enforce a trademark you can loose it. So this is probably helping protect their trademark.
And this also draws attention -- in a potentially viral way -- to their brand and the fact that velcro is distinct from and perhaps better than "hook and loop".
Not just lip service, they come right out and say it:
Us lawyers have to protect our people. Using the VELCRO® trademark properly allows us to protect the integrity of the VELCRO® Brand and our trademark rights, and protect consumers from purchasing products incorrectly identified as VELCRO® Brand products. It’s, you know, the right thing to do
