Disneyfication [LWN.net]

Disneyfication

Posted Sep 23, 2021 11:47 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Disneyfication by anselm
Parent article: A disagreement over the PostgreSQL trademark

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.

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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.