Disneyfication [LWN.net]

Disneyfication

Posted Sep 22, 2021 21:55 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: A disagreement over the PostgreSQL trademark by anselm
Parent article: A disagreement over the PostgreSQL trademark

Nah, Disneyfication still has exactly the sort of unpleasant meaning the Disney corporation would prefer was unavailable, but while they could sue people for using that word (you can sue people for anything whatsoever) they would clearly lose, because the most plausible targets are big media empires and (aside from the ones actually owned by Disney) those are no strangers to frivolous lawsuits and would defend themselves. If you go after say The Atlantic for writing about Disneyfication, they are going to hire people to defend the suit and win. e.g. "How the Olympics got Disneyfied" is still right there for you to read.

Likewise, US corporations once upon a time threatened many fledgling UK computer magazines demanding they write ® everywhere because the names of all their computers, software etc. were legally registered trademarks. The magazines, and their publishers, and the publishers' lawyers, told them to fuck off. Actually this wasn't so long after 1971, so perhaps they told them “We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram” which has the same meaning.

You're correct that trademark and copyright are separate, and yet this type of muddled thinking is nevertheless all too common.

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Disneyfication

Posted Sep 23, 2021 8:58 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (2 responses)

Disneyfication still has exactly the sort of unpleasant meaning the Disney corporation would prefer was unavailable,

If you hold a trademark on a term that doesn't mean that term becomes “unavailable” to anyone but you. It just means that nobody but you gets to sell something that – by virtue of what it's called or looks like – could be mistaken (by reasonable customers) to be your product.

“Disneyfication” is not something that the Disney corporation is marketing. Hence there is no risk of someone else's product to be mistaken for “Disneyfication”. The Disney corporation legal team is probably not enthusiastic about the existence of the term given that it is not exactly complimentary, but trademark law gives them no leverage to outlaw it for everybody else (or, as you say, they could try but it would be a waste of time, money, and effort), and they know it. Having said that, even if the Disney corporation had a trademark on the term “Disneyfication”, that wouldn't prevent the likes of The Atlantic from writing about it – it would just prevent other companies from marketing a similar product under the same name.

The problem Google, Hoover, and friends have is not that purveyors of other search engines or vacuum cleaners are trying to pass off their own offerings as Google/Hoover/… imitations, it's that they're so successful in the market that the general public is using “hoover” to say “vacuum the carpets” rather than “use specifically a Hoover brand vacuum cleaner (and not, say, a Samsung, Roomba, or any of the other vacuum cleaner brands commonly available to customers) to vacuum the carpets”, which if the word has to exist at all is the usage that the Hoover corporation would vastly prefer. Unfortunately for these companies, that sort of thing is very hard to police. Marketing departments everywhere are trying to navigate a treacherous path between the highly desirable goal of making their product's name very well-known among the public and the very undesirable effect of making it a synonym for the entire market segment; this is why they earn the big bucks.

Disneyfication

Posted Sep 23, 2021 11:47 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

But this completely undercuts your earlier point. All the corporations would dearly like to control the narrative, and indeed they all publish "official" trademark rules saying you mustn't do any of the things they don't want you doing. But those aren't the law.

Disney can't stop me writing about Disneyfication of the education system, Google can't stop me writing that people should stop Googling my name. Both could sue me (but that might be a bad idea) of course, but the law is clear in both cases. Far from being somehow a magic ingredient that has prevented words like "Disneyfication", or because of an imaginary obligation to do so, Disney sues trivial infringers because it can, because it is rich.

Disneyfication

Posted Sep 24, 2021 10:06 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Far from being somehow a magic ingredient that has prevented words like "Disneyfication", or because of an imaginary obligation to do so, Disney sues trivial infringers because it can, because it is rich.

Yes, and because they apparently enjoy coming across as assholes.

The word “Disneyfication” isn't a trademark issue at all, because nobody has a trademark on “Disneyfication” and even if they did, it wouldn't prevent anyone from talking about the phenomenon. I've never claimed that corporations have an “obligation” to sue. What corporations do want (apart from preventing competitors from selling products that pretend to be the original) is to avoid their product's name becoming an equivalent of the word “hoover” standing in for “any vacuum cleaner regardless of actual brand”. Lawsuits (or the threat of such) are one tool that is available to them in the endeavour to achieve this; whether these will get them anywhere is generally up in the air, and there is also a PR angle to be considered.

This is not entirely theoretical. For example, here in Germany Google successfully leant on the editors of Duden (the leading German-language dictionary, comparable to the OED or Merriam-Webster in the USA) to change the entry for googeln from “use a search engine such as Google to search something on the Internet” to “use Google® to search something on the Internet”. Whether this will get Google anywhere in their attempt to rescue “googling” remains to be seen, but it looks like they're not going down without a fight.