Velcro doesn't want you to call it 'velcro' anymore

well, in the microcosm of UK, the Irish are the other, and the Scots a barbarian tribe only recently pacified. :wink:

(no, not entirely serious)

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Speaking as a former resident of York - when did this happy event take place?

(definitely not serious).

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I hate to say it, but those kids are going down hard. Welcome to Cease and Desist City.

tbh, as soon as I saw the Fat White Man With Short Hair In A Suit (And Likely Too Much Money) screaming “or our trademark will get KEEELD!!”, I actually started to wish this would happen. So I’ll velcro a post-it somewhere to make sure I velcro some velcro in any regular conversation, like a velcro smurf.

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The Styrofoam people (Dow) must be especially irked by this, since most people use the name of their product for the wrong material.

STYROFOAM Brand Foam is not used in the manufacture of disposable foam products, such as food packaging, cups, plates, coolers or egg trays. These disposable products are made of either molded expanded polystyrene beads or thin extruded polystyrene sheet, neither of which is manufactured by Dow in the United States.

So next time you get a cup of java to go, remember, you can’t drink coffee from a STYROFOAM cup - because there is no such thing!

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These people should just take a couple of bayer and go xerox something.

(See what I did there? :wink:

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I (kind of) understand the point about trademark dilution, but their point is also that everybody can make this “hook and loop” stuff now, right? So this Velcro product isn’t special anymore?

Tell me…

What else can I do, passively in my daily life, to make lawyers lose their sh*t?

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Considering they don’t own the patent, no. The product was invented 1941 and patents are good for 20 years. They own the trademark to the name only.

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Basically yes. As Grey_Devil said.

Their point is

"The only real selling point we have is that our hook and loop product has our name on it. We hope you think it’s better than other hook and loop products and will want to use it rather than another.

Therefore we want to make sure you can rely on being pretty sure that when you pay extra for something called Velcro, it is actually our product.

We would also prefer it if you’d stop referring to shitty generic products as Velcro as it makes other people think our product is shitty".

Well, that’s the nice way of putting it.

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Well in my case:

using ‘passively’ for something that requires you to be active

and this:

will do it. :slight_smile:

Otherwise feel free to videotape yourself jumping around on your trampoline while velcroing thermos flasks full of dry ice to an escalator. Remember to use your flip phone to do it.

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Icy what you did there, maybe in the Fridge too long?

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Cant find it now but as someone earlier pointed out, there is a quality difference between various brands and no-brand hook and loop fasteners.

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Or bandaid


QI XL Series K, Episode 1 - Knees & Knockers

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I’ve never understood why businesses would object to their trademark becoming a generic word. As long as your competitors don’t use your brand (and they don’t, even in the case of band-aids and kleenex), it seems like it would be a good thing.

Surely Velcro’s one and only selling point is that they alone are able to sell velcro under the name by which it is actually known? If normal people called it “hook and loop fasteners” or “pubic tape” or “adhesion velvet” or whatever, they’d have nothing.

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I would personally find “unfastening sound” more threatening. VELCRO brand velcro doesn’t make much of a noise when you fasten it.

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When I was a boy, my parents (both depression babies) taught me to be a cheapskate, only they called it “Being Scotch”, and it was a notable virtue. Scots were considered admirably frugal, people who knew how to get the most value for their money.

When people of that generation wanted to say something racially denigrating that equated to stinginess or avarice, they’d go after the Jews, not the Scots.

(This was in the USA, though. I’m pretty sure you’re right about the pejorative intent if we’re talking about the English!)

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The problem is that if a company does little to curb the general use of their trademark they can actually end up losing the trademark altogether. There are existing cases where a company sued to protect their trademarks and had the court rule that the name had become too common and that they would no longer protect the trademark.

What Velcro is doing is exactly that, they are making a big show about their protected Velcro name to make sure that they can continue to enforce their rights over it.

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