Here at the Law Office of Vincent Miletti, Esq. and the home of the #UnusuallyMotivated movement, we take pride as a resilient and dependable legal services firm, providing such services in both a traditional and online, web-based environment. With mastered specialization in areas such as Employment and Labor Law, Intellectual Property (IP) (trademark, copyright, patent), Entertainment Law, and e-Commerce (Supply Chain, Distribution, Fulfillment, Standard Legal & Regulatory), we provide a range of legal services including, but not limited to traditional legal representation (litigation, mediation, arbitration, opinion letters, and advisory), non-litigated business legal representation and legal counsel, and unique, online legal services such as smart forms, mobile training, legal marketing, and development.

Still, here at Miletti Law®, we feel obligated to enlighten, educate, and create awareness about how these issues and many others affect our unusually motivated® readers and/or their businesses. Accordingly, to achieve this goal, we have committed ourselves to create authoritative, trustworthy, & distinctive content. Usually, this content is featured as videos posted on our YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtvUryqkkMAJLwrLu2BBt6w and blogs that are published on our website WWW.MILETTILAW.COM. With that, the ball is in your court and you have an effortless obligation to subscribe to the channel and sign up for the Newsletter on the website, which encompasses the best way to ensure that you stay in the loop and feel the positive impact of the knowledge bombs that we drop here!

As the authoritative force in Employment Law, it only seemed right to introduce one of the many upcoming series where we remain persistent in introducing a variety of topics, which will look to not only educate but also deliver in a sense that only Miletti Law® can. In this regard, this blog is Part X of our ongoing series on the “Fundamentals of Trademarks,” where a number of continuing blogs have been dedicated to exploring trademarks in detail & depth. In Part IX, we hammered on “The Proper Use of Trademark under the Trademark Law” and discussed the four aspects of proper use of trademark, including visual distinction, consistency, proper adjectives, notice, and no possessiveness or plurals. Having exhausted that list, we now switch gears, yet again, to explore the various ways in which trademark rights could be lost or terminated. As we will see in the next few blogs, trademark rights can be lost or terminated in four ways that include “genericide,” “abandonment,” “improper assignment,” and “naked licensing.” In this regard, this blog is titled “Losing/Terminating Trademark Rights Through “Genericide” and is a discussion of the concept of “genericide” and how it could lead to the loss or termination of trademark and ownership rights.

Genericide – The First Way through which Trademark Rights Could be Lost or Terminated

Under the trademark law, a trademark loses its entitlement to protection under this law after it becomes generic. This happens when the relevant public ceases associating a mark’s primary significance with the source of a good or product but with the name of such a particular good or product. Some products such as cellophane, aspirin, and escalator became generic for this reason, although they were once protectable as individual trademarks.

In the blog titled “The Proper Use of Trademark under the Trademark Law,” accessible through https://milettilaw.com/blog/f/the-proper-use-of-trademark-under-the-trademark-law, we mentioned that marks are typically used as adjectives and gave KLEENEX tissue as a perfect example.” However, this does not imply that a mark does not necessarily become generic after it starts being used as a verb. For instance, if one says “good question, I’ll GOOGLE it” is different from the verbal usage of “GOOGLE it” as a trademark. In the second example, one may be talking about the mark in a generic and indiscriminate sense (but without any pre-conceived search engine), but it could also be used discriminately using the mark with “GOOGLE” and the pre-conceived search engine of choice. However, when such usage becomes generic, then the trademark rights could be lost or terminated.

In the next blog and Part XI of the series, we shall move the discussion forward by hammering on “Losing/Terminating Trademark Rights Through “Abandonment.”

Stay tuned for more legal guidance, training, and education. In the interim, if there are any questions or comments, please let us know at the Contact Us page!

Always rising above the bar,

Isaac T.,

Legal Writer & Author.