I know it's more nuanced than this, but generally (in the US, at least) holders of a trademark need to defend the mark at the peril of "abandonment" or the mark becoming "generic". I expected to see something about this in the post.

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kstrauser 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think this is hugely misunderstood, though. You have to defend your trademark, but it's still within your rights to grant someone permission to use it.

The Notepad++ guy wasn't an attack dog here. I'm 100% behind his reasonable position. Just saying, you're not legally obligated to say "no, no one else in the entire world can use it". It's more that you have to say "no one else can use it without my permission." Also just saying, if you want to use someone else's trademark, it's a really, really bad idea to start the conversation by using it without their permission and thereby requiring them to decide right then and there whether they'll allow you to. It's kind of like asking to borrow someone's car versus taking it first and then asking if that was OK.

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EvanAnderson 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> I think this is hugely misunderstood, though. You have to defend your trademark, but it's still within your rights to grant someone permission to use it.

I think it's a case of where a lot of people don't have experience with trademark licensing.

Back in the 90s I worked for a small company that was in various "partner" programs with hardware and software companies (Microsoft, Intel, Citrix, etc). Each "partnership" agreement came with trademark licensing documentation and very, very specific usage requirements for using the trademarked name, logos, etc. With at least one of the companies we had to get ad copy approved for compliance with our license.

	▲	kstrauser 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And those kinds of licenses support your case where you have to defend your trademark. “See, your honor, how we diligently negotiated licensing terms with other parties, who compensated us for it? This is an active trademark used in business.” The single biggest thing is that you have to stop people from using it without permission. If that means you stop them by granting that permission, then so be it.

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knuckleheadsmif 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That’s correct. The best example is that of cellophane tape which was a brand but it lost protection. Xerox very aggressive in the day and wrote lawyer letters to anyone who used Xerox as a verb to protect their brand.

I’m not sure if Google has ever done similar but people use google as a verb to mean web search and I’m not sure if they worried about losing brand protection or though of it as an advantage in acquiring users.

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w4rh4wk5 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I commonly hear people saying that, but then other people claiming this isn't true.

Is there a clear source for this mechanism?

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dec0dedab0de 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The problem is if it becomes a normal word in everyday use, then it can lose it's trademark. I suspect it will happen to google soon, I definitely have heard people say they googled something on bing. Wikipedia has this list of trademarks that were lost this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

This issue with Notepad++ isn't even really about trademark, even though that would be the legal means to enforce it. It's more about Criteria #4 of the opensource definition "Integrity of The Author’s Source Code" Which is there so you can't give the original project a bad name while forking it. https://opensource.org/osd

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rpdillon 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People say it's not true because people confuse copyright and trademark. It isn't true for copyright at all, but it is true for trademark.

Incidentally, this is why Richard Stallman objects to the term intellectual property. It bundles together three very different areas of property rights (copyright, trademark, and patents) and treats them as sort of a single entity, even though they're really very different, both in their reason for existing and in their mechanisms.

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msla 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> People say it's not true because people confuse copyright and trademark. It isn't true for copyright at all, but it is true for trademark.

People believe so many dumb things about copyright, trademark, patents, and trade secrets. For example: You don't legally need to use the various symbols for trademarks and copyrights you don't own. Unless there's a contract in force saying you have to, there's no Symbol Police gonna rappel from the skylights and break your keyboard if you say you used a Xerox without the nifty ™ symbol.

Another thing I've seen is the apparent notion that you can "renew" a copyright. Nope, not for a long time now: You get the full term up front with no special action, and once it's done it's gone, unless the law is actually changed in the meantime. Disney didn't "renew" the copyright on "Steamboat Willie" and the dumb live-action remakes aren't being done to "renew" anything, they're just some executive having a brain fart.

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J-Kuhn 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, if you are Disney, it turns out you can - by having the law changed just before the thing would go into the public domain.

	▲	msla 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you've noticed, Disney has stopped doing that. New stuff is entering the Public Domain. Like "Steamboat Willie", which I believe was mentioned here recently.

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6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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intrikate 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It was a big enough deal that Nintendo put out advertisements in 1990 [0], asking people to not use "a Nintendo" to refer generically to other video game systems, specifically out of fear of genericization.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/nintendo/comments/5m9grz/theres_no_...

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munk-a 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can find examples in each direction but, considering the potential damage of not defending a trademark, it's usually worth being quite proactive about that defense.

There isn't a clear source (at least that I'm aware of) since this is handled by the legal system with a lot of nuance on a case by case basis. It is very reasonable to be proactive in trademark defense but if you aren't courts may still side with you if the establishment of usage was clear.

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jmuguy 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A pretty recent example would be Twitter https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbbrandon/2026/01/06/operati...

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moduspol 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Don't Say Velcro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRi8LptvFZY

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8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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OhMeadhbh 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

15 U.S.C. § 1127

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LeCompteSftware 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But there would be no basis to claim this trademark was abandoned (even before Don Ho responded to infringement). Notepad++ is famous software actively getting new features and new releases. It is well-known among technically sophisticated Windows users in the US, and until this kerfuffle Don Ho's ownership of the name was never seriously contested in OSS circles. Nobody could reasonably claim this trademark is stale or generic.

	▲	EvanAnderson 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's nuanced. I'm not an attorney and I don't have the bandwidth right now to go looking for citations. The general read I'm getting is that zealously defending your rights to the mark are the safest way to make sure a court doesn't see you as abandoning your rights. I gather that different courts in the US have treated a lack of defense differently.