[jxdxbx]

The top comment there is not correct. You do not have to "defend" trademarks or they "expire."

You lose a trademark if it becomes generic, regardless of how hard you tried to keep it from being so. Obviously if you let a bunch of actual infringements slide you're on the way to becoming generic, but all that matters is whether the trademark IS generic.

But, when lawyers write letters to people saying "you can't say escalator or Zamboni" you can just ignore them. Using a trademark in writing in a way that a trademark owner does not like is not infringement.

[afzalive]

You definitely need to provide evidence of use.

https://www.dreyfus.fr/en/2025/03/18/proof-of-use-in-the-uni...

[ASalazarMX]

> You lose a trademark if it becomes generic

And this is my biggest gripe with products from well-known companies that use already generic terms like "Apple", "Word", "X", or "Inkwell". I understand claiming exclusivity of words like "Microsoft Word", but not for the word "Word" itself.

[NewJazz]

Yeah where does it become a violation. Like if i wrote an app called wordsmith, and it does basically what word does, let you edit documents, is that really a trademark violation? Because i used the word word?

[mardef]

Considering Microsoft wasn't allowed to use SkyDrive as a name for cloud storage because Sky is registered for unrelated purposes, I would assume using the same trademark in a directly competing product would not be allowed.

https://www.geekwire.com/2013/microsoft-rename-skydrive-sett...

[esquivalience]

In the business, we often refer to that sort of reminder activity as "defending" against genericism. Practice varies by country but the point is often to show that you are not passively allowing the trade mark to become generic. Yes, you can often ignore letters (unless they request an answer or make a threat, which might be a different situation) - but it's usually a good idea to spend some time looking at it from the other person's perspective first.

[jxdxbx]

Yeah, but there are a TON of things that trademark lawyers do that are counter-productive. I put vaguely aggressive letters from trademark owners in that category, such as Monster energy drinks thinking they get to control how others use the word "monster."

I remember when the Apple logo stickers Apple packed in had a little (R), which was later dropped, since it's ugly and not legally required. But no doubt some lawyer advised putting it there to begin with.

[chihuahua]

The Monster example is funny. An attorney friend of mine had a job that required him to go after everyone in the world who used the word "Monster", because their client, Monster Cable, thought they owned the word in every sense and context.

I wonder if there was ever an epic Monster sugarwater vs Monster Cable showndown.

[rmunn]

That brings up an interesting point about the ethics that attorneys have to follow. (Not an attorney myself but have relatives who are, so someone please correct me if I get a detail or two wrong). Attorneys are supposed to represent their client to the best of their ability, even if what the client wants done is stupid. The attorney can advise and say "Hey listen, filing that lawsuit is dumb and a waste of your time and money, you have zero chance of winning" but if the client says "I don't care, file the lawsuit anyway" then the attorney has to file the suit, even if they know the client has no chance of winning. There are some professional lines that attorneys are not allowed to cross, such as misrepresenting the content of legal cases they cite (lawyers have gotten dinged for doing so accidentally by not double-checking LLM-written documents before filing them, and citing hallucinated cases or misrepresenting the content of real cases that were cited). But as long as they don't cross those lines, attorneys have to do whatever the client asks them to do, even if they know it's stupid. Their job is to represent the client's opinions, not their own.

[duskwuff]

Monster Jobs and Monster Cable came into conflict over the .monster TLD. (It went to the job board, but they abandoned the TLD a few years later, as both the company and brand TLDs went into a decline.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.monster

[Affric]

Needs to be generic in the United States, and only the United States... which is funny considering the global jurisdiction US courts often assume.