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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.
BING
IS
NOT
GOOGLE
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
That is how the word is used now, and the summery even states that the ruling takes this into account. They know that googleing is a generic word, but Google is not. A search engine is not called a google, only Google is called Google. This does not change just because googleing is a generic term for performing a internet searching.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
More to the point, when people use, "Google," as a verb, they mean to actually use Google, as opposed to using any brand of facial tissue available when saying, "Kleenex."
Besides, if Coca-Cola can retain, "Coke," as a trademark when vast portions of the country refer to basic soft carbonated soda drinks of any type as, "coke," then I don't think that those challenging Gogole's trademark have much of a chance.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
Actually, when people say googling, they really do mean "look it up using Google." They don't mean "look it up using DuckDuckGo" or "look it up using Yelp" or "look it up using Ask.com" or "look it up using Wolfram Alpha."
When Google no longer dominates generic web search (as opposed to specialized internet search like Yelp) and there are other comparable players, only then would there be a case for genericization. Until then, when you say googling, people think search using Google. That's actually fairly specific (unusually so even) in terms of word meaning.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
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 :-)