If you have not heard, Digg.com recently had a post about how Adobe still doesn’t want people to use Photoshop as a verb . Oh, And they don’t want people using photoshop in lower-case letters.
Google has also recently been chewing out the media for saying “Googled” and “Googling”.
I say screw ‘em.
You know… as much as I like protecting one’s intellectual property there comes a time when you throw in the towel and say “screw it”. Name one company that has gone out of business because of trademark genericization? Genericization is simply part of the life-cycle of a product.
Product gets released, becomes really popular, the term becomes generic, and then people use the term as a verb and use it to describe other products.
It just happens.
And anyways, what could a company do? Sue? Hah, I doubt’ they’d win.
All Adobe has to do is say “We make the only true Photoshop software”. That is all. People will always use it as a verb, and people will always write it in lower-case letters.
Please subscribe, or else I will cry. Do you really want to make a programmer cry?
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