Fun with trademarks!

In the editing business, one perennial bugaboo is the issue of trademarks. Trademarks, and their kid brothers service marks, are intellectual property and should be capitalized. They include Budweiser, Marlboro, Green Mountain, Apple, Yankee Candle, Walt Disney World, Colt .38 Super, Chantix, and so on and so forth. If they appear in print or online, in nonfiction or fiction, they need to be capped. Unless they are out of context. Or dead.

Apple, of course, when referring to the computer company, is a trademark. But just because they own that trademark doesn't mean that you need to cap apples. Unless the apples HAS a trademarked name! For example, the names Honeycrisp and Gala were at least at one time trademarked for apples, so although their status is not clear at the moment, they are usually capped. The McIntosh is not a trademark, but is the name of the man who discovered the apple, so is also capped.

Elsewhere on the food front, cheeses are often capped because they are named after a place, like Camembert and Brie. But sometimes they are trademarked, like sorta-cheese Velveeta. And sometimes it doesn't matter. There is a place called Cheddar, a British village, but their cheese went out and conquered the world, so it is no longer associated strongly with that place and generally not capped anymore. Although it is sometimes. But that's not a trademark issue. It's house style issue. (Every publisher has long lists of house style peculiarities and preferences for the sake of internal consistency.)

Artificial substances can be very frustrating. Latex? Not a trademark. Nylon? Dead trademark. Spandex? Not a trademark. Neoprene? Not a trademark. Rayon? Not a trademark. Nitrile? Not a trademark.

Aha! No synthetic materials are trademarked!

Tyvek? Trademark. Dacron? Trademark. Tencel? Trademark.

We just have to look up crap like this all the time.

If you're in the field -- like, a communications executive for a cheese company -- you may eventually know the status of every cheese name there is off the top of your head. But then you'll run into something like Kobe beef and you're off to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office site. (For the record, the K in Kobe beef is capped as a place name, but Certified Kobe Beef is a trademark in its entirety, and there are lots of other trademarks connected to the famous meat, but many are dead.)

Companies often fight like hell to make sure their trademarks are identified as such, because if they get used as ordinary nouns, or verbs, guess what? The USPTO kills the trademark. That's what happened to aspirin, corn flakes, linoleum, and yo-yos. So Xerox, Kleenex, and all those other common trademarks are jealously guarded, because the act of guarding them keeps them alive. If the company won't fight for it, it must not matter, right? And this is why humorless letters are sent from company law departments when they see acts of infringement.

Xerox used to have a bigger problem protecting its name before computer files made hard copies less important, and I suspect Kleenex as a trademark is actually made safer by the loss of market share to competitors like Puffs, Northern, and Scotties. People are less likely to just "grab a Kleenex" now than they were forty years ago.

I see a lot of trademarks that people mistakenly forget are trademarks. Some common violations include:

• Munchkin (for doughnut-related products)
• Solo (cups)
• Crock-Pot (say slow cooker)
• Rice Krispies (especially as Rice Krispies Treats)
• Ping-Pong (yes, the game; call it table tennis)
• Popsicle (Unilever owns it so don't listen to people who call it generic)
• Baggies (still owned by Reynolds Wrap, although the actual product line seems to be discontinued)
• Marshmallow Fluff

Hell yeah, they're still making this stuff

On the other hand, some well-known trademarks have lost their status. You may now lowercase dumpster, thermos, and windbreaker in peace.

Google is being stupid about theirs, I think. It comes up constantly as a verb, to the point where most publishers I work with have thrown up their hands and said, "All right, if the people want to say they'll 'google' stuff, leave it lowercase." Google may think that this means free publicity, and that they don't care because they have more money than God, but the Trademark Office is as picky as a copy editor in a bad mood -- if they don't try to protect the name "Google," people will start infringing it with impunity, and they'll be powerless to stop it. Or maybe they've anticipated that, which is why they changed the main company name to Alphabet. I have no idea what they're thinking out there.

The protection of trademarks makes the development of innovative products profitable, which is an economic good for all of us. So that's why we editors do our bit to protect the live trademarks. Also, we hate getting letters from attorneys. Does anybody like getting them?