Law Commons^™

Sui-Genericide, Jorge L. Contreras

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Generic terms – those that describe a general class of goods or services – are not eligible for trademark protection. Firms have historically gone to great lengths to prevent their trademarks from becoming generic – a fate often referred to as genericide. But in a few rare cases, firms have voluntarily declared certain terms that they have created to be generic, a phenomenon that I refer to as “sui-genericide”. This article explores the little-discussed phenomenon of sui-genericide, both its origins in government-sponsored programs of the mid-twentieth century and its most recent incarnation in the area of technical interoperability standards. Though …