"Generocide is the term coined to describe the loss of a trademark that no longer serves as an indicator of a source of goods because consumers came to regard the trademark as a generic term."

The word is "powerpoint," and it is used generically by millions of people to mean "presentation graphics" or a "slideshow presentation created on a computer." Those terms don't sound familiar to many people, because they're awkward synonyms of the vernacular "powerpoint." In my own office, our people say "powerpoint" all the time. They don't mean "Microsoft PowerPoint." They could mean anything from a self-running Flash presentation, to a word processing document, to a series of JPGs in a folder, to a web page! The only common thread is that they succinctly and beautifully (depending on the skill of the creator) summarize the sales pitch being made. And they almost always use "powerpoint" as a noun.

I think it's time we formalize this situation. Why? To make it easier to talk about a "powerpoint" that I made using Impress or KPresenter or Corel Office. When your professor says, "Turn in your assignment powerpoints at the beginning of class," she's not trying to make you purchase a $500 software program (unless she's a big shareholder of MSFT). You can use any of a dozen tools, many free, to generate your assignment, no different than when she asks you to turn in a web page. You can say to your prof, "Can I use OpenOffice Impress to make my powerpoint?" and she'll say "Use what you want, I don't care." (That's my idealized version, anyway.)

Returning to the IP Counsel Blog, to avoid generocide, the trademark should:

1. be used as an adjective. Not "Xerox", but "Xerox photocopier";
2. not be used as a noun of any type, singular, plural or possessive. not "put on a band-aid", or "two band-aids", or "band-aid's adhesive quality", but rather "put on a Band-Aid bandage", or "the adhesive qualities of Band-Aid bandages"; and
3. not be used as a verb (never "Xeroxed", but rather, "photocopied").