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Court Rules the "Google" Trademark Isn't Generic
ericgoldman writes Even though "googling" and "Google it" are now common phrases, a federal court ruled that the "Google" trademark is still a valid trademark instead of a generic term (unlike former trademarks such as escalator, aspirin or yo-yo). The court distinguished between consumers using Google as a verb (such as "google it"), which didn't automatically make the term generic, and consumers using Google to describe one player in the market, which 90%+ of consumers still do.
Fun fact. Check the reverse DNS of any Google server IP address, and it'll probably reside under xxxx.1e100.net
In my experience, very few people use "Xerox" as a verb. I've much more often heard "make some copies on the Xerox machine" (and less often without the "machine") referring generically to a photocopier.
In any case, bad example, as Xerox still holds their trademark.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Here's a Band-Aid to apply to that burn. Take some Aspirin, too.
Take some Aspirin, too.
Interestingly the trademark 'aspirin' (and the trademark 'heroin') was taken from Bayer AG and made generic as part of the war reparations from WWI. Outside of the major WW1 allied powers, 'aspirin' is still a trademark of Bayer.
As a pedant, I'd like to note that aspirin did not become a generic as a result of its mass usage nor as the result of a court case, but was part of war reparations with Germany. See here for more detail, or just google it :-)
I mean, specifically GO TO FUCKING GOOGLE.COM and use the search engine there. Not Bing, not whatever else, and especially not your "ask.com" tool bar that infected your computer. GOOGLE. Nobody uses it generically, they all mean specifically go to Google to search. It's you retards that don't know how to search that think we mean something else.