Re: "Displays/appears" has run its course, so let's do trademarks again (was: "RE: Article in front of hardware or software")

[voxwoman <voxwoman -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Hey, I no longer work for them.

Usually we can get away with doing what you say, and I know about the
page(s) of disclaimers for 3rd-party marks at the beginnings of books and
the various agreements BigCo1 had to make with BigCo2 to talk about their
products in manuals.

I didn't realize I was standing in a field of dead horses.

-Wendy

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 4:57 PM, Andrew Warren <awarren -at- synaptics -dot- com>
wrote:

> voxwoman wrote:
>
> > And, depending on your legal department, you may be required to use
> the
> > noun as an adjective to protect the trade name.
> >
> > "Aspirin" used to be a trademarked name for an analgesic, and was the
> > example used in the advertising class I took in college. (Band-Aid and
> > Kleenex also nearly lost their brand names because of their use in
> > common language).
> >
> > It got really awkward in one manual I was writing to use an article
> > before the product name every single time, but our marketing
> department
> > demanded we do so.
>
> Wendy:
>
> When a company's paying your salary, you sorta have to follow its rules
> no matter how silly or misguided they are... But your marketing
> department might have found it instructive to look at how trademarks are
> handled by corporations with deep pockets and presumably-competent
> intellectual-property attorneys.
>
> Apple and Microsoft don't use trademarks as adjectives "every single
> time".  Toyota doesn't, either.  Nor does Google... And neither do Xerox
> or Coca-Cola, two companies that we may presume are INTIMATELY familiar
> with the dangers of allowing a trademark to be used generically.
>
> Using a trademark as an adjective -- and/or including the R-in-a-circle
> or TM symbol -- is generally safe, but it also impedes readability, and
> it's really not required... When's the last time, for example, that you
> saw a newspaper or magazine article about the new "Ford Motor CompanyTM
> Mustang(R)-brand automobile"?
>
> -Andrew
>
> === Andrew Warren  - awarren -at- synaptics -dot- com
> === Synaptics, Inc - Santa Clara, CA
>
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