Genericized Trademarks

The owner of a brand name can lose their legal protection for it if people started using it as the common or generic name for a type of product or service. This is what happened to Cellophane, Escalator, Flip Phone, Frisbee, Hovercraft, Kerosene, Sellotape, Trampoline, and Videotape. This is why Adobe really doesn’t want you using “photoshop” as a verb. This also nearly happened to Nintendo, which is why Nintendo promoted the use of the term “games console” so people would stop calling consoles produced by other manufacturers “Nintendos.”