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Comment by geff82 | Hacker News Reader

So your brand got the rare honour of being used in many languages of the world as a verb, burning the brand to peoples heads and then, instead of being damn proud, you publish such a marketing nonsense and slam it in peoples faces? Are you kidding me?? Really, your marketing department thinks this is wrong? Challenge accepted. Let me GIMP your brand out of my mental image.

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This is not a marketing page. It's a legal page from their lawyers stating how the brand name should be used, such that they don't loose control over their trademark. You better believe they're damn proud of the fact that their name is being used as a verb. They just have to show that they're defending the brand so that they don't loose their trademark. Google and Kleenex are in the same boat.

While Kleenex is commonly used to refer to any brand of facial tissue, I've never heard of it being used as a verb.

They face the same legal challenge though. Also, you don't Kleenex your face? :)

It's been a few years since I looked at a print version of "Writer's Digest," but there would regularly be ads stating Kleenex was a brand name for facial tissue. A number of companies, like Xerox, would do the same thing to protect their trademarks.

As noted elsewhere, while the legal departments hate it, the marketing departments probably love it.

Here's Google's terms [1]. I just remembered Bing was trying desperately to turn bing into a verb! Bing it, they said.

[1] https://www.google.com/permissions/trademark/rules.html

The verb now has negative connotations, in that anything refereed to as photoshopped means it is obviously badly edited and/or fake looking.

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