On Nov 25, 2006, at 12:44 AM, David Savage wrote: > Chrysler are victims of their own marketing then. Jeep has now entered > the English language, they will forever be defending the trademark. > > It's the same problem that Apple is having with it's i-Pod trademark. > Look at the number of mp3 players that are now i-this or pod that. > > I remember reading a British photo magazine years ago (like how I > steered this back towards photography :-) The author referred to a > ball point pen as a biro in one of his articles and got a politely > worded letter from the Biro trademark owners lawyers, telling him to > stop that. He was simply unaware that it was a brand. > > I have no point, other than if an advertising campaign & the product > are successful, & it enters common language usage, the trademark > owners are going to be very busy.
Yep. Lots of letters to send out. When I was writing for Shutterbug I got quite a nice collection of the "Velcro letter". Every time I mentioned Velcro in an article I got one. I always capitalized Velcro as a nod to its brand name status, but they would have had me check each time to see if what I was describing on a product was really Velcro brand or not. If not, they wanted me to call it "generic hook and loop fastener". Yeah, that really rolls smoothly off your tongue! Bob -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
