genericide

A trademark so widely used it becomes the common word for the thing — aspirin, escalator, thermos — and the more everyone says it, the less it points to the one who made it.

Genericide is the death of a trademark by success: the term becomes the generic name for a class of products, and a court rules it has lost its source-identifying function entirely. The canary wing found the same law operating on coined-term canaries: a term that spreads because it is useful loses its source-specificity — the fingerprint dissolves into the background it helped build. The detection-only canary escapes the detection-entitlement trade-off by dropping ownership, but it encounters genericide as a second law: adoption erodes the signal the same way corpus scale dilutes the footprint. The more successful the term, the less it fingerprints — the genericide of trademarks is the proof that adoption erodes source-identification, and the canary trap's lurid prose was adoption-resistant because its distinctiveness was not useful.