free months by going to expressvpn.com/HAI. Using Google as a verb is a tradition as old

as Google's tradition of avoiding taxes. Like emo bands, all-denim outfits, and standing

on rubble, googling found its way into popular culture in the early 2000s—famously, it

was first used on television in 2002 on an episode of the newly problematic Buffy the

Vampire Slayer, and that same year the American Dialect Society ranked “google” as the

most useful word of 2002, not to be confused with the most useful bird of 2002, which was

obviously the vulturine guineafowl. Just look at that plumage—that is a hot bird. By 2006,

google had been added to Oxford English Dictionary, as a verb, under the definition: “To use

the Google search engine to find information on the Internet.” Soon, other brands even

tried to get in on the action, leading to a 2010 episode of the TV show Hawaii Five-0

where a character says not-at-all-casually, “You don't believe me? Bing it,” in

the most awkward piece of product placement until this exact mention of top-rated VPN

provider ExpressVPN, available with three-months free at expressvpn.com/hai. Now, at first

glance, you might think that the widespread use of google as verb would be great news

for google: but as Nicolas Cage and Type 2 diabetes have taught us, you can have too

much of a good thing… because it turns out that this gaggle of googling is threatening

Google's trademark. The 1976 Lanham Act, which governs US trademark,

states that, “no incontestable right shall be acquired in a [trade]mark which is the

common descriptive name of any article or substance, patented or otherwise.” That's

basically fancy talk for you can't trademark a name if it's the commonly used term for

a type of thing, the reason being that for something to qualify as a trademark it must

be “distinctive,” which is defined as “having the capacity for identifying and

distinguishing particular goods as emanating from one producer or source and not another.”

In a nutshell, this why you can't trademark the term “garbage,” as that commonly describes

all trash, but you can trademark the term “Taco Bell's Naked Chicken Chalupa”

as that clearly references a specific type of trash made by a specific company. And this

is where big business boys can run into big business problems—if their trademark becomes

so widely used that it no longer clearly identifies something as their product, but instead is

used as the general term for that type of product, they can lose their trademark.

One of the earliest examples of this is the word escalator—you know, the things people

stand side-by-side on like psychopaths, slowing everyone down and causing unimaginable human

suffering when they could just as easily stand on the right and walk on the left. And don't

you dare fact-check me with that study saying standing on both sides is faster overall because

of more throughput capacity—Wikipedia says that's wrong. Escalator was a trademark

of the Otis Elevator Company since its debut at the 1900 Paris Exposition, and for the

first 50 years of the escalator's existence, anytime somebody other than the Otis Elevator

Company wanted to sell the world's lamest ride, they had to call it “motorstairs”

or an “electric stairway.” The problem was, motorstairs never caught on with the

public—regardless of what company had made the steppy human conveyor belt, people called

them all escalators, which is why in 1950, a court ruled in Haughton Elevator Co. v.

Seeberger that the word escalator had “become recognized by the general public as the name

for a moving stairway, as the result of the registrant's course of conduct causing the

mark to lose significance as an indication of origin, and registration is thereof cancelled.”

This process, of losing a trademark to widespread use, has the forgettable MCU villain-sounding

name “genericide,” and like forgettable MCU villains, there are a lot of examples:

dumpster was once the trademark of the Dempster Brothers, zipper was a trademark of B.F. Goodridge,

flip phone was trademarked by Motorola, and there are a ton more: aspirin, yo-yo, teleprompter,

super glue, dry ice, laundromat, videotape, and even heroin, which was once a trademark

of Bayer. And seeing as Google only wants to be like

heroin in terms of the YouTube algorithm's addictive power, not in terms of trademark

genericide, the company has been sending out cease and desist letters to people who misuse

google since 2003. Their first went to a blogger who ran a site tracking neologisms and claimed

the term “googling” was starting to be used to generically refer to web searching—and

amidst their legal threat, they even included a helpful guide to proper usage, which included

this, 100% real, example: “Appropriate use: I ran a Google search

to check out that guy from the party.
Inappropriate use: I googled that hottie.”

In addition to not wanting you googling hotties, Google also wouldn't want you to say that

hotties are “ungoogleable”—unless you mean it literally. The Swedish Language Council

learned that the hard way in 2013, when they attempted to define “ungoogleable” or

“ogooglebar” as “[Something] that you can't find on the web with the use of a search

engine," resulting in a cease-and-desist letter from Google, who complained that the definition's

said “a search engine” and not “the Google search engine.”

In the end, though, even if Google does manage to protect their legal right to their trademark,

they still shouldn't be feeling too lucky—after all, there are a ton of trademarks that are

still legally enforceable, but are nonetheless widely used as a generic term, which has taken

away much of the trademark's value. For proof, just look at ChapStick, which is still

a trademark owned by Pfizer. The thing is, though, no matter what waxy tube I rub on

my dry smackers, even if it's Burt's Bees or Blistex, I'm probably still gonna call

it chapstick. And there are tons more: most people know

about Kleenex, Band-Aid, and Xerox, but what about Styrofoam, Bubble Wrap, Jet Ski, Lava

Lamp, Q-Tips, and Rollerblades? Unless your favorite social networking site is also the

Wikipedia page “List of generic and genericized trademarks,” you probably didn't know

that those are all still legally enforceable trademarks owned by specific companies—which

is exactly why they aren't particularly valuable anymore.

But it's not all bad news for Google: they still control 90% of online search, plus your

email probably, and they can track everything you do on your smartphone—which actually,

wait, seems… bad. Big tech makes a lot of their money off of your data, so it's probably

time to put some protection between your online activity and these companies, and that's why

I use ExpressVPN. When you run ExpressVPN on your device, the software hides your IP

address, making your activity harder to trace and sell to advertisers—plus, they encrypt

100% of your internet data to keep you safe from hackers and eavesdroppers, and all without

slowing down your connection. Also, in a slightly less existential threat, big tech prevents

you from watching your favorite video content in the countries they don't want you to,

but ExpressVPN lets you route your internet through foreign countries where streaming

sites' catalogues are different, so they allow you to get access to thousands of additional

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