Original Article
I'm posting it because I've been thinking a lot recently about companies that spend a lot of energy getting their product name (or slogan) to become part of the English language and then turn around and say, "You're infringing on our copyright when you say that."
Is Xerox really unhappy that people use xerox as a verb? Is Kleenex really unhappy that people say, "Can you hand me a kleenex?" Would they really want to give up all that name recognition and free advertising? Or do they just have to pretend they're unhappy so that they can prove in court that they are defending the trademark?
I think there is a lot of evidence to support the notion that companies want their trademarks to become part of how people speak:
- Those print ads admonishing people not to use Xerox as a verb or whatever... Do they run them in Newsweek or Rolling Stone or other popular magazines? I've never seen them there. I've only ever seen them in trade journals with relatively small readerships. And I've certainly never seen Xerox run a TV ad about not using their name in vain. If they really wanted to get the message across, why not use the most effective form of advertising?
- Also, those ads only ever appear after the trademark has been fully established in the language (and is therefore unlikely to fade away). Yes, the modern BandAid commercial sings about "BandAid Brand," but if you go find the original commercial that aired for years, you'll hear it sung, "I am stuck on BandAid, cause BandAid's stuck on me." They spent years running this ad, got a nation of children singing it on playgrounds, and then changed the lyrics and started lecturing people about how they were using their name wrong.
- Finally, if companies don't want their product names to be used as common nouns, how do we explain: "Hi, I'm a Mac"? Shouldn't that be "Hi, I'm a Mac brand computer. Or are they going to wait until they've successfully got the entire population using Mac as a noun and then say we're infringing on their intellectual property?
I can see quite a difference between trademarking a catch phrase versus trademarking the company name. I think that what companies like Xerox, BandAid, and Kleenex are encountering are people are using their brand name to generalize to everyday products.
ReplyDeleteI think that trademarking a catch phrase is fairly common. If you think about it, there are a lot of cases where this happens such as Nike's "Just Do It", McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It", KFC's "Finger Lickin' Good", and etc. I don't think trademarking a catch phrase is intended to prevent people from using it, but rather to prevent competitors from jumping on the bandwagon of a popular phrase. Just as a commenter had pointed out in the article, Verizon uses the phrase "There's a map for that!" in its ad campaign. They try to use the familiarity of the Apple phrase "There's an app for that" to their marketing advantage.
You make a good point. I agree that they aren't intending to prevent people from using the slogan in everyday speech. And I certainly don't mind them preventing competitors from using their slogan. But I'm thinking about them preventing it in creative works. If I'm writing a screenplay, I now can't have a character say "There's an app for that" without getting permission from Apple, even though that's how people speak. I've already had an editor tell me that I couldn't use the word Band-Aid in a piece of prose, because it is trademarked. He wanted me to use 'adhesive bandage', which is definitely not how people speak in real life. I feel like we want our writers and artists to be able to depict the world as it really is. When trademark holders fill our world with logos and slogans that become an inescapable part of our cultural landscape, I feel like we have some right to reflect them in our own creative expression.
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