Still, this seems way too laborious unless you're building some aerospace thing.
Us lawyers have to protect our people. Using the VELCRO® trademark properly allows us to protect the integrity of the VELCRO® Brand and our trademark rights, and protect consumers from purchasing products incorrectly identified as VELCRO® Brand products. It’s, you know, the right thing to doI actually use "tissue" and "copy", but those kinda make sense. Personally I hate it when people keep saying "I Googled..." because it reminds me of this bullshit search engine monoculture we have right now (I try to use DuckDuckGo more, but I miss the days of Yahoo, Lycos, Hotbot, Dogpile, Excite and how they all give you DIFFERENT results!)
Velcro though ... totally didn't even realize it was a brand until like just now .. and I'm still going to use it generically, because it should just be at this point. :-P
I think the original poster meant "genericized" instead of "lapsed". But Velcro is clearly already genericized, as you note.
As such, you can buy "Velcro [BVBA] velcro", or you can call 3M's hook-and-loop fasteners "3M velcro". 3M, naturally, avoids using the term "velcro" in its packaging and marketing, and would never use "Velcro", because even though they could, because the term is genericized, it would still be free advertising for a competitor.
Capitalization has no bearing on word marks (in the US, at least. I can't speak for other countries). "Velcro", "VELCRO", "velcro" are all the same thing as far as the trademark office is concerned. And yes, there are still active trademarks for the word "VELCRO", but it has still been unquestionably genericized.
As an example of all-caps trademark, LEGO bricks. Like velcro, LEGO is a portmanteau. Velcro is velour-crochet, and LEGO is leg-godt ("play good"). And like velcro before it, LEGO is now fighting genericization.
If they lose the struggle, kids will play with legos instead of LEGO bricks. They might be legos made by Lego then, but LEGO would be the trademark. It might not be relevant to the word mark, but the image mark is stylized in all caps.
This is nitpicky, but I am sharing some of my experience from writing software that produces brand reports for trademark lawyers. The USPTO might not be case-sensitive, but some of the lawyers are very case-oversensitive, so our software had to take that into account. I still have trouble using a trademark as a noun or verb.
In the UK I can go in to shops the length of the country and ask for velcro and get "hook and eye" or "fabric fastener", is a completely generic term now, just no one wants to fight it in court.
* UK trademark record, https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/4/EU00...
You can lose your trademark protection if the term becomes genericized and you fail to police its use. It's exceedingly rare for this to happen, the law isn't clear-cut, and different courts have ruled differently in similar cases, but it is technically possible. Velcro doesn't have to rabidly attack everyone trying to genericize its brand, and so long as they are still using it themselves and making some occasional effort to legally defend it, they're fine. But if other brands started calling their products "velcro" in the generic sense, and Velcro ignored it for a decade or more, they could in fact lose the trademark entirely.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...
I think you're wrong here.
Genericisation isn't a function of your policing of your mark.
The only other way to lose a mark is not pay your fees, you can police it as loosely as you like.
What being heavy handed does is increase damages and inhibit allowed usage that a company is not in control of.
I think this is one of the greatest misunderstandings about RTMs.
(I'm only really familiar with the USA and UK IP laws, know something of European and EU regulations, not much beyond that.)
[1] https://www.lego.com/en-us/legal/notices-and-policies/fair-p...
> If the LEGO trademark is used at all, it should always be used as an adjective, not as a noun. For example, say “MODELS BUILT OF LEGO BRICKS”. Never say “MODELS BUILT OF LEGOs”.
* "Velcro" -> "hook and loop"
* "Kleenex" -> "tissue paper"
* "Dumpster" -> "garbage bin"
* "Frisbee" -> "flying disc"
A "dumpster" is thus historically a container that can be emptied by a standard front fork loading garbage truck. Long containers that are towed onto a tilt-bed truck are something else, usually debris boxes. But they now tend to be called "roll-on dumpsters".
Isn't that also called a skip? The wiki page for trash skips says that the term is more of a British/Australian/New Zealand english thing[1], but I've definitely heard people call them skips in the US.
Nintendo had a similar campaign decades ago: https://i.redd.it/20vipleteraz.jpg
That's my guess, I don't necessarily hold that view. But it did drag the conversation in a vastly different direction. :-)
As a consequence I try to avoid mentioning things that will go in a political direction, like Trademark, Copyright, etc. as these terms tend to be very charged for certain people. Once you bring it up people will dogpile the discussion and eventually your article on the Lost Art of Lacing Cable is full of comments about how Trademarks are stupid and Copyright is Copywrong.
It's not really about relevance, but rather that the main focus of the comment is something that invites a lot of political discussion with very little substance.
If you don't enforce a trademark you can loose it. So this is probably helping protect their trademark.
And this also draws attention -- in a potentially viral way -- to their brand and the fact that velcro is distinct from and perhaps better than "hook and loop".
A Very Short Introduction” of a man in 1990 who filed for a trademark on his red, white and blue assortment of “Stealth Condoms”, with the tag-phrase “They’ll never see you coming.” Northrop, the maker of the B-2 “stealth bomber”, sued to stop him, claiming that the man had purloined and even harmed the reputation of their trademark. He went bust.
https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2017/09/09/why-comp...
I really like genericized trademarks - fun to look over lists like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...
The problem is when the either the brand becomes so dominant ("Kleenex(tm) facial tissues") or the item really lacks an easy, generic noun (Velcro(tm) "hook-and-loop-fasteners". Yeah.)
Escalator(tm) ... motorized staircase?
Trampoline(tm) ... spring jumping pads? Oh, "Rebound tumbler".
Dry Ice(tm) ... solid carbon dioxide?
Dumpster (tm - who knew?) ... large dump-able garbage bins? Bet they really don't like Dumpster(tm)-diving or Dumpster(tm)-fires.
And patents exacerbate this "problem" behavior, because for for the life of the patent (17+ years) the product class is uniquely associated with the brand, so there's no need for anyone to use a generic term (Velcro(tm), Aspirin(tm) acetylsalicylic acid, Xerox(tm) photo-copies).
So the lesson is, when you create your innovative new product, don't just give it a catchy name, also give it a catchy descriptive name, and make sure you promote both.
If this is IT, I used this hook and loop tape that you would came on large spools that you cut to length. You always got the exact length of tape you needed and there were never any parts to get caught. It was also reusable which was nice when you had to add an extra cable to the bundle.
They're a bit expensive, but well worth it, especially if you're doing something that's likely to be near-permanent.