on 21 September 2006Apple’s ‘pod’-trademarking shenanigans reminded me of Google moaning about people using ‘google’ as a verb. Trademark dilution is a serious issue, but who told trademark holders they were in charge of the vernacular?
Intellectual property courts have no business awarding points to litigants for ‘protecting’ their trademarks by asking journalists or other members of the public to desist from using language in a way that isn’t unlawful. That’s either a waste of everyone’s time or an unwarranted threat, which is unlawful.
Google accused the Washington Post of ‘genericide’ when an article included Google among ‘the handful of proper nouns that have moved beyond a particular product to become descriptors of an entire sector – generic trademarks’. The writer, Frank Ahrens, must have had IP law rammed down his throat like every other journalist, so he probably knew a trademark holder wouldn’t take ‘generic’ as a compliment. But not even Google’s lawyers claim there’s any law against saying it.
If we want to google, we’ll google. We’ll google so hard we need a band-aid. We’ll xerox our googles and blu-tack them to the ansaphone.
Oh, and by the way, Adobe, I Photoshopped all the pictures on this site.
Funny thing: while Adobe discourages the use of ‘Photoshop’ as a verb, one of the magazine reviews it uses to promote the app is this MacAddict snippet:
It’s rare for a product name to become a common word in our language… Photoshop is the latest example of this; it has become a verb that means ‘to manipulate an image’.
That’s a good thing now? For a moment it sounded like genericide.
adambanksdotcom Google Instant seems like the search equivalent of the Interrupting Cow knock-knock joke