This video was made possible by ExpressVPN. Start browsing the web securely with three
free months by going to expressvpn.com/HAI. Using Google as a verb is a tradition as old
as Google’s tradition of avoiding taxes. Like emo bands, all-denim outfits, and standing
on rubble, googling found its way into popular culture in the early 2000s—famously, it
was first used on television in 2002 on an episode of the newly problematic Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, and that same year the American Dialect Society ranked “google” as the
most useful word of 2002, not to be confused with the most useful bird of 2002, which was
obviously the vulturine guineafowl. Just look at that plumage—that is a hot bird. By 2006,
google had been added to Oxford English Dictionary, as a verb, under the definition: “To use
the Google search engine to find information on the Internet.” Soon, other brands even
tried to get in on the action, leading to a 2010 episode of the TV show Hawaii Five-0
where a character says not-at-all-casually, “You don’t believe me? Bing it,” in
the most awkward piece of product placement until this exact mention of top-rated VPN
provider ExpressVPN, available with three-months free at expressvpn.com/hai. Now, at first
glance, you might think that the widespread use of google as verb would be great news
for google: but as Nicolas Cage and Type 2 diabetes have taught us, you can have too
much of a good thing… because it turns out that this gaggle of googling is threatening
Google’s trademark. The 1976 Lanham Act, which governs US trademark,
states that, “no incontestable right shall be acquired in a [trade]mark which is the
common descriptive name of any article or substance, patented or otherwise.” That’s
basically fancy talk for you can’t trademark a name if it’s the commonly used term for
a type of thing, the reason being that for something to qualify as a trademark it must
be “distinctive,” which is defined as “having the capacity for identifying and
distinguishing particular goods as emanating from one producer or source and not another.”
In a nutshell, this why you can’t trademark the term “garbage,” as that commonly describes
all trash, but you can trademark the term “Taco Bell’s Naked Chicken Chalupa”
as that clearly references a specific type of trash made by a specific company. And this
is where big business boys can run into big business problems—if their trademark becomes
so widely used that it no longer clearly identifies something as their product, but instead is
used as the general term for that type of product, they can lose their trademark.
One of the earliest examples of this is the word escalator—you know, the things people
stand side-by-side on like psychopaths, slowing everyone down and causing unimaginable human
suffering when they could just as easily stand on the right and walk on the left. And don’t
you dare fact-check me with that study saying standing on both sides is faster overall because
of more throughput capacity—Wikipedia says that’s wrong. Escalator was a trademark
of the Otis Elevator Company since its debut at the 1900 Paris Exposition, and for the
first 50 years of the escalator’s existence, anytime somebody other than the Otis Elevator
Company wanted to sell the world’s lamest ride, they had to call it “motorstairs”
or an “electric stairway.” The problem was, motorstairs never caught on with the
public—regardless of what company had made the steppy human conveyor belt, people called
them all escalators, which is why in 1950, a court ruled in Haughton Elevator Co. v.
Seeberger that the word escalator had “become recognized by the general public as the name
for a moving stairway, as the result of the registrant’s course of conduct causing the
mark to lose significance as an indication of origin, and registration is thereof cancelled.”
This process, of losing a trademark to widespread use, has the forgettable MCU villain-sounding
name “genericide,” and like forgettable MCU villains, there are a lot of examples:
dumpster was once the trademark of the Dempster Brothers, zipper was a trademark of B.F. Goodridge,
flip phone was trademarked by Motorola, and there are a ton more: aspirin, yo-yo, teleprompter,
super glue, dry ice, laundromat, videotape, and even heroin, which was once a trademark
of Bayer. And seeing as Google only wants to be like
heroin in terms of the YouTube algorithm’s addictive power, not in terms of trademark
genericide, the company has been sending out cease and desist letters to people who misuse
google since 2003. Their first went to a blogger who ran a site tracking neologisms and claimed
the term “googling” was starting to be used to generically refer to web searching—and
amidst their legal threat, they even included a helpful guide to proper usage, which included
this, 100% real, example: “Appropriate use: I ran a Google search
to check out that guy from the party. Inappropriate use: I googled that hottie.”
In addition to not wanting you googling hotties, Google also wouldn’t want you to say that
hotties are “ungoogleable”—unless you mean it literally. The Swedish Language Council
learned that the hard way in 2013, when they attempted to define “ungoogleable” or
“ogooglebar” as “[Something] that you can't find on the web with the use of a search
engine," resulting in a cease-and-desist letter from Google, who complained that the definition’s
said “a search engine” and not “the Google search engine.”
In the end, though, even if Google does manage to protect their legal right to their trademark,
they still shouldn’t be feeling too lucky—after all, there are a ton of trademarks that are
still legally enforceable, but are nonetheless widely used as a generic term, which has taken
away much of the trademark’s value. For proof, just look at ChapStick, which is still
a trademark owned by Pfizer. The thing is, though, no matter what waxy tube I rub on
my dry smackers, even if it’s Burt’s Bees or Blistex, I’m probably still gonna call
it chapstick. And there are tons more: most people know
about Kleenex, Band-Aid, and Xerox, but what about Styrofoam, Bubble Wrap, Jet Ski, Lava
Lamp, Q-Tips, and Rollerblades? Unless your favorite social networking site is also the
Wikipedia page “List of generic and genericized trademarks,” you probably didn’t know
that those are all still legally enforceable trademarks owned by specific companies—which
is exactly why they aren’t particularly valuable anymore.
But it’s not all bad news for Google: they still control 90% of online search, plus your
email probably, and they can track everything you do on your smartphone—which actually,
wait, seems… bad. Big tech makes a lot of their money off of your data, so it’s probably
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