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Comment by TurkTurkleton | Hacker News Reader

I was going to say "found the Velcro employee"-- excuse me, I meant "employee of the company Velcro BVBA"-- but surely a Velcro employee would know that Velcro BVBA makes Velcro-branded hook-and-loop-fastener cable management products.

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I was just poking fun at Velcro's absurdity. I in no way endorse their view of their branding. I just saw someone say Velcro and I never have had an opportunity to share that lovely page. Seemed tangentially relevant.

Examples of alternatives to trademarked names:

* "Velcro" -> "hook and loop"

* "Kleenex" -> "tissue paper"

* "Dumpster" -> "garbage bin"

* "Frisbee" -> "flying disc"

I never knew "Dumpster" was one. Actually makes a lot of sense when I think about it. Thanks!

Wait, dumpster is trademarked? I've never heard of this before, but according to [0] it is definitely a generic trademark. Although this may be a great example of why VELCRO(R) is fighting a losing battle. At this point, it may be too late to change the average consumer's habits, as VELCRO(R) is in almost the same situation. Perhaps if they had started this campaign when the patent expired and generic alternatives appeared, but it's probably too little, too late at this point.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumpster

Sure. Famous inventor, George Roby Dempster. The Dempster Dumpmaster was the truck built to go with the Dempster Dumpster, using a hydraulic fork system that picks up the Dumpster and empties it into the truck. Dempster invented that, and sold garbage trucks and compatible containers. Once the patents expired, it's was a de-facto standard.

A "dumpster" is thus historically a container that can be emptied by a standard front fork loading garbage truck. Long containers that are towed onto a tilt-bed truck are something else, usually debris boxes. But they now tend to be called "roll-on dumpsters".

> Long containers that are towed onto a tilt-bed truck are something else, usually debris boxes. But they now tend to be called "roll-on dumpsters".

Isn't that also called a skip? The wiki page for trash skips says that the term is more of a British/Australian/New Zealand english thing[1], but I've definitely heard people call them skips in the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_(container)

IMO all of these are too generic and should loose trademark status (without a specific additional context phrase such as X BRAND indicating it's actually the brand and not the type of product).

But do you endorse a company's right to meet their legal obligations to protect their brand?

Nintendo had a similar campaign decades ago: https://i.redd.it/20vipleteraz.jpg

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