This is called trademark erosion. An example of this historically would be aspirin, which was originally a trademarked brand name of Bayer but was legally ruled in 1918 and 1921 to have become genericized, because the company took no actions to prevent others from using the name.
This generally only applies when non-holders use the trademark to market in the same field as the original business, though: not "we went to McDonald's", but rather "welcome to McDonald's (no relation to the corporate giant), would you like fries with that?". It doesn't apply in this case because the Call of Duty series has nothing to do with selling vehicles.
I think this is really just a case of lawyers being super-protective. It also pays well, I'm sure.
I think a words like Humvee or even Google have coloquially already lost their meaning--their meaning is polymorphic, it's only a matter of time (100 years is a matter of time) before a better Humvee or Google not released by the original product designer comes along that people will call Humvee or Google anyways.
The very first that came to my mind is Jeep. In some countries it literally means SUV nowadays.The term is so ingrained that pretty much everyone says like this: 'He's got a BMW Jeep' or 'Look, that's a nice looking Jeep, surely it's Mercedes!'. The funniest thing is that nobody can ever see a real Jeep anymore,as nobody buys them( talking about Europe here).
In my country, "Jeep" is actually an official vehicle classification category from the transportation ministry, which includes cars such as Suzuki Jimny and Katana. FCA (and Ford) doesn't have official presence here anymore, so nobody probably bother to lobby the government against it.
How is this an example of trademark erosion? Fiat-Chrysler still owns the rights to the name and would easily be able sue a competitor that tried calling their vehicle a Jeep. Sure, it's colloquially used as a genericized trademark, but it's not a true example, unlike ones like aspirin, cellophane, escalator - or yes, trampoline.
People using it colloquially is exactly the thing that leads to trademark erosion.
Most eroded trade marks were previously owned and registered. It's not the registration that gives trademark protection. Trademark protection exists to protect the market place. It prevents companies from piggybacking on someone else's success.
But if the consumer doesn't think that "Jeep" is a mark, but a form factor, then no one is protected from any misunderstanding and it would be no longer a trade mark. Happened to Motorola in 2005 with "flip phone".
Really I think this illustrates best that trademarks are of dubious sanity. They attempt to police language but have no real control over it - pouncing like attack dogs to try to set an example to the kind of people who call all game consoles "Nintendos". In practice it seems like makework for lawyers which we need like a hole in a head - while to defend imaginary property in pursuit of imaginary lost profits.
I can't help but think society would be better served by using the court system for just about anything else including seeking damages from the gentleman who sold them the brooklyn bridge.
I would want some defense if someone was using say a trademark I made for kid entertainment vulgarly. Unfortunately marketing does sometimes mean policing language, if you would end up in an unfortunate position due to association
Jeep is actually enforcing this! In the game hill climb racer 2 there were two vehicles, "Jeep" and "Super Jeep". They had to change the names of the vehicles in the game... (To "Hill Climber").
There seemed to be tons of Jeep brand SUVs in Italy when I was there in October. Our rental car was one without asking for it, and there were four in a row at our hotel in Amalfi. Maybe they are popular in tourist areas?
Right now I live in London and all I see are European SUVs (Range Rover,MB,Jaguar,BMW) with an occasional Toyota or Lexus and maybe 1 Jeep out of 10000 other cars.
We've got it more or less the same in Lithuania with a lot of brands. "Pampers" is the default name for nappies. "Scotch" and "Xerox" are popular in Slavic languages,we never picked these up for some reason. Here,in the UK, the more popular ones are: Stanley Knife( any retractable knife) or Hoover( Vacuum cleaner).
For most of my life I didn’t know Jeep was a brand. It’s simply what you call most off-road vehicles in German. And looking at Wikipedia it seems like that is the case in most of Europe.
Hardly anybody remembers nowadays but Elevators and Fridges used to be brand names (of the Otis Elevator company and Frigidaire, respectively). So the endpoint of nobody remembering that your IP is IP has been reached in practice.
And more recently there's the PC, which became detached from IBM in record time.
And plenty of reason to think against. The "dg" sound doesn't come through in "Frigidaire" at all. It does have an actual letter "d" present, but with the "i" in between the sound becomes entirely different. Compare to refrigerator, where the "frige" portion of the word slants easily to rhyme with "ridge."
I can't go that far. What country are you from? I would have said the second syllable of "refrigerator", and the first syllable of "Frigidaire", both obligatorily rhyme with "ridge". There's no alternative.
"Frigidaire" should only really differ from "frigid air" in terms of prosody.
California. I suppose it's just a difference in accent, because I've always heard Frigid pronounced somewhat like fri-jid, with a clear enunciation between the parts, rather than the blended "dg" sound.
I'm actually assuming it pronounced with a more enunciated J sound than other poster accents seem to. I've always heard frigid with the emphasis on the "J" sound, rather than the softer blended j sound that produces the "dg" blend.
Wikipedia has a good list of trademarks in various states of becoming generic. It's interesting to read and think how silly it is how many terms still have protection despite not having any mental association with a particular company.
Aspirin didn't become generic because Bayer "took no action", it became generic because the trademark was surrendered as an explicit term in the Treaty of Versailles.
Most trademarks these days don't need to worry about being the literal spoils of war.
A trademark can only be defended in the face of an incursion into a protected use. If it's an "other field", then it can't be defended and the suit fails.
Fair enough and technically, I think you're right that it's not a "defense" with legal precedence (and therefore not an actual defense). But, I don't think that reality stops many companies from trying to stop the use of their brand or product in other fields because they believe they're protecting the brand.
That said, this AM General case seems to be a licensing case -- they want money for the use of the of their design. To some degree, I don't blame them since Activision is profiting from their work.
Suppose Activision sets a game in Los Angeles. A crucial mission involves a running battle down Hollywood Boulevard.
Should Graumann's Chinese Theater be entitled to money for the use of the appearance of their famous building?
To what extent should Google pay AM General, Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, and so forth for the use of their vehicles' appearances in Streetview?
Finally: someone makes a Mail Simulator game, in which you take the role of being a first-class letter trying to get to a particular house on the other side of the continent. The role of postal vehicle is played by a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_LLV
How much do they owe to Grumman, or to the USPS, or GM?
> To what extent should Google pay AM General, Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, and so forth for the use of their vehicles' appearances in Streetview?
None. Google captured photos in public, they didn't put those vehicles there, they don't want them there and they don't add any value to streetview.
It's hard to compare that to Call of Duty where activision is intentionally modeling, texture mapping, animating and rendering someone else's design for the express purpose of adding value to their product.
This generally only applies when non-holders use the trademark to market in the same field as the original business, though: not "we went to McDonald's", but rather "welcome to McDonald's (no relation to the corporate giant), would you like fries with that?". It doesn't apply in this case because the Call of Duty series has nothing to do with selling vehicles.