A brand name that is used too generically by too many people risks losing its legal trademark status. (Xerox and Kleenex have fought hard against this, while Aspirin and Band-Aid have lost their trademarks.)

According to BitLaw, “A valid trademark can become generic if the consuming public misuses the mark sufficiently for the mark to become the generic name for the product. The prime examples of former trademarks that became the generic name for a product are ASPIRIN and CELLOPHANE. Current trademarks that were once considered to be candidates for becoming generic are XEROX and KLEENEX. XEROX has spent a great deal of advertising money to prevent misuse of its mark. By doing so, XEROX has likely avoiding the loss of its trademark.”

The IP Counsel Blog calls this process “generocide”: “Generocide is the term coined to describe the loss of a trademark that no longer serves as an indicator of a source of goods because consumers came to regard the trademark as a generic term.”

Software is as susceptible as any other product (see this article about Google’s trademark peril). Though this seems like a real risk, I think we are about to see a different trademark loss occur.

The word is “powerpoint,” and it is used generically by millions of people to mean “presentation graphics” or a “slideshow presentation created on a computer.” Those terms don’t sound familiar to many people, because they’re awkward synonyms of the vernacular “powerpoint.” In my own office, our people say “powerpoint” all the time. They don’t mean “Microsoft PowerPoint.” They could mean anything from a self-running Flash presentation, to a word processing document, to a series of JPGs in a folder, to a web page! The only common thread is that they succinctly and beautifully (depending on the skill of the creator) summarize the sales pitch being made. And they almost always use “powerpoint” as a noun.

I think it’s time we formalize this situation. Why? To make it easier to talk about a “powerpoint” that I made using Impress or KPresenter or Corel Office. When your professor says, “Turn in your assignment powerpoints at the beginning of class,” she’s not trying to make you purchase a $500 software program (unless she’s a big shareholder of MSFT). You can use any of a dozen tools, many free, to generate your assignment, no different than when she asks you to turn in a web page. You can say to your prof, “Can I use OpenOffice Impress to make my powerpoint?” and she’ll say “Use what you want, I don’t care.” (That’s my idealized version, anyway.)

Returning to the IP Counsel Blog, to avoid generocide, the trademark should:

1. be used as an adjective. Not “Xerox”, but “Xerox photocopier”;
2. not be used as a noun of any type, singular, plural or possessive. not “put on a band-aid”, or “two band-aids”, or “band-aid’s adhesive quality”, but rather “put on a Band-Aid bandage”, or “the adhesive qualities of Band-Aid bandages”; and
3. not be used as a verb (never “Xeroxed”, but rather, “photocopied”).

The first two conditions are rarely met when one talks about a powerpoint. Thus, the crux of my argument. Still not convinced? Look at definition two of “PowerPoint” on Wiktionary.org.

So why am I writing this? I want to start a blogmeme and see if others pick up and pass this idea around the net. I think it would be fun and maybe subversive to raise this issue. It just might, with luck, enter the public consciousness and help solidify my premise that powerpoint is a generic term and should be recognized as such.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 at 6:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.