Disneyfication

Disneyfication

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.