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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Could happen. Wikipedia has a list of trademarks formally lost for becoming generic: Aspirin, Catseye, Cellophane, Dry ice, Escalator, Flip phone, Flit gun, Heroin, Kerosene, Lanolin, Laundromat, Linoleum, Mimeograph, Sellotape, Spidola, Teleprompter, Thermos, Trampoline, Videotape.

Xerox is still fighting becoming generic. 3M continues to fight on for "Scotch tape".

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I highly doubt it, for three reasons:

1. Google has a whole suite of products that bear its name.

2. The name is not on-the-nose like many of those examples, Videotape, TelePrompter, DryIce, etc.

3. It's not a derived from a clinical or scientific name for a substance. Linoleum is made from linseed oil; Google was not built from googols.

Honestly, I think Apple would lose the iphone trademark before Google does.

I double-take every time I see some fiction where some supposedly real person uses a capital letter for "dumpster", because seriously nobody does that, but apparently there is actually a Dumpster brand and the company that owns it is notoriously litigious.

What in the world is the non-"Dumpster" word for a dumpster?

The Dempster Dumpster had a standard form factor, so that the forks of a Dempster Dumpmaster truck could pick it up and dump it into the back.[1] The patents have expired, so now anyone can make compatible rubbish bins and trucks. The standard form factor lives on for compatibility with the installed base. Properly, the term "Dumpster" refers only to containers compatible with that system.

There's also the Dempster Dinosaur, for when a Dumpster just isn't big enough.[2] That form factor is called a "roll off".

The Dempster brothers solved the problem of collecting, lifting, packing, and moving a lot of trash without hand labor, and dominated the industry for decades. Dempster, the company, seems not to have survived. The "Dumpster" trademark was allowed to lapse. From the USPTO:

    DUMPSTER (EXPIRED) 
    CONTAINERS FOR RECEIVING, TRANSPORTING, AND DUMPING MATERIALS OF VARIOUS
    KINDS-NAMELY, REFUSE, TRASH, GARBAGE, SCRAP, DIRT, AND ROCKS.
    FIRST USE: 1936-09-01.

The generic term is "rubbish bin".

[1] http://www.classicrefusetrucks.com/albums/DE/DE07.html [2] http://www.classicrefusetrucks.com/albums/DE/DE05.html

In Dutch, we call it a container. Yes, the English word is used by the Dutch to refer to the rubbish bin we all have outside of our houses. They're all the same style too pretty much: hard plastic (not sure which type) and all pick-uppable by the garbage collectors. Though they do come in different volume sizes.

https://autoline.nl/img/s/gemeentelijke-machines-vuilniscont...

A skip? A bin?

I mean I know that doesn't replace that name to your ears now, but if that word was never made up others would have been used instead, as they do in some other anglophone corners of the world.

Roller Blade was the one that always surprised me. I was shocked they seemed to successfully push inline skating to save it.

They forced a movie to change its name.[1] It's a skater movie, but not an inline skater movie.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089930/

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