polo said:
Lat say we use generic words in original meaning. If webtv is trademark it doesn't mean it's not generic. You can trademark any word. Webtv is tv via web as satellitetv is tv via satellite. Maybe webtv and satellitetv were not generic 30 or more years ago, before web and satellites existed but thay are generic today. It's just my opinion and i am not a lawyer.
Thanks
People say
Band Aids generically and that doesn't change the fact that it is still the registered trademark of Johnson & Johnson. What people do and say do not make a trademark null and void. Just try to produce Adhesive Strips and call them Band Aids and see what happens.
Once again, Wikipedia explains all this:
"A genericized trademark (or trade mark), sometimes known as a generic trade mark, generic descriptor or proprietary eponym, is a trademark or brand name which is often used as the colloquial description for a particular type of product or service as a result of widespread popular or cultural usage. Where a genericized trademark becomes or replaces the common term for a product or service, the mark has become generic. Escalator and Thomas Edison's mimeograph are classic examples. In the U.K. the term hoover has long been colloquially synonymous with vacuum cleaner, owing to The Hoover Company's dominance of the UK vacuum cleaner market in the first half of the 20th century. That it has been more than 100 years since the first vacuum cleaners were commercially available in the UK, and that Hoover is no longer the biggest selling brand of vacuum cleaner in the country, illustrates the depth to which generic trademarks can persist in their usage. A trademark typically becomes "genericized" when the products or services with which it is associated have acquired substantial market dominance or mind share. However, a trademark may still become genericized in the absence of significant market share through mechanisms such as viral marketing.
Whether or not a mark is popularly identified as genericized, the owner of the mark may still be able to enforce the proprietary rights which attach to the use or registration of the mark, so long as the mark continues to exclusively identify the owner as the commercial origin of the applicable products or services."
Read the whole article at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark
I think that explains the whole WebTV issue.
You can create something and that something becomes so universal that people forget that it didn't exist as a word previously. Take, "Robot," for example. It didn't exist as a word before the Czech writer Karel Čapek coined the term in his story
Rossum's Universal Robots in 1920. Now, robots, is generic and in common use. Now you can't trademark it and say its yours.
Microsoft does seem to think that WebTV is its property and has indeed successfully defended it against those that have disagreed. There is no doubt that they own the term. I think that people are forgetting that when WebTV started, just like in the case of Robots, nobody used the term in that fashion (though probably thought it). The company created it. (That's common knowledge. Go to Wikipedia and read about WebtV. There's no need to wonder about it whether Microsoft owns the trademark or not:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webtv)
Another very good example of a business creating a phrase that is now a generic term is IBM and eBusiness. IBM coined the term eBusiness. They created the phrase for an advertising concept. Nobody said or thought eBusiness (in that fashion) before IBM invented the word. They failed to trademark its use, however (by design if you believe what their CEO at the time, Louis V. Gerstner Jr. wrote in his book, "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance"). Now the term is universal and everyone uses e-this and e-that.
eThat eWas eReally eDumb eOf eIBM, eToo.
