DuPont's Teflon does not want to go the way of Hoover - C&D's Swedish bloggers for speaking Swedish.

This is all getting a little silly.
Dupont has been sending out cease and desist letters to Swedish bloggers who have the domains Teflonminne.org and now Teflonminne.se - in the latter link you can read PDF's from Dupont linked at the bottom of his post (see Hotbrevet, Bilaga 1, Bilaga 2.) All links are in Swedish only.

Dupont are simply defending their trademarked name "Teflon", something Hoover should have done before it became a term simply meaning "to vacuum" in the UK, and in Swedish the trademarked named "Jeep" is now synonymous with SUV, so any car that has SUV qualities is called a Jeep even if it's a Honda.

Obviously, Dupont don't want this to happen, and the way some trademark laws sound it seems you have to at least make a show of defending your trademark in order to keep your trademark so one could gather that the vaguely formulated C&D is really just for show. However, Teflon became a registered trademark in Sweden as late as in 1999, while the word "teflonminne" meaning "scatterbrain", "featherhead", or plain "confused" as it symbolizes nothing sticking to your memory has been used in colloquial Swedish for much longer than that and even the dictionary explains that common usage includes describing stuff that nothing sticks on as in "teflon politician".

Not sure how their trademark-defending case will go, but I know this for certain - C&D'ing Joe-blogger to give up their rights of their domains is buying Dupont and "teflon" a boatload of bad publicity in Sweden.

Update: You can see how many Swedish bloggers are talking about this at Knuff.se

Adland® is supported by your donations alone. You can help us out by buying us a Ko-Fi coffee.
Anonymous Adgrunt's picture
comment_node_story
Files must be less than 5 MB.
Allowed file types: jpg jpeg gif png wav avi mpeg mpg mov rm flv wmv 3gp mp4 m4v.
Dabitch's picture

I should have linked this straight in the post from the start - anyway, Google who is suffering the fate like Hoover and Jeep have made this post about the phenomena which " is as distressing to our trademark lawyers as it is thrilling to our marketing folks" Do you google?

Here are some hopefully helpful examples.

Usage: 'Google' as noun referring to, well, us.
Example: "I just love Google, they're soooo cute and cuddly and adorable and awesome!"
Our lawyers say: Good. Very, very good. There's no question here that you're referring to Google Inc. as a company. Use it widely, and hey, tell a friend.

Usage: 'Google' as verb referring to searching for information on, um, Google.
Example: "I googled him on the well-known website Google.com and he seems pretty interesting."
Our lawyers say: Well, we're happy at least that it's clear you mean searching on Google.com. As our friends at Merriam-Webster note, to "Google" means "to use the Google search engine to find information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web."

Usage: 'Google' as verb referring to searching for information via any conduit other than Google.
Example: "I googled him on Yahoo and he seems pretty interesting."
Our lawyers say: Bad. Very, very bad. You can only "Google" on the Google search engine. If you absolutely must use one of our competitors, please feel free to "search" on Yahoo or any other search engine.