> Sadly that's indeed how trademark law works - if you don't make even a token effort at enforcing your rights, they can become common names and effectively be lost.
Can they? Give me examples of such trademarks being lost.
Do make sure to check your examples. Maybe you heard say that Xerox lost their trademark. Nope, Xerox® is still a registered trademark of Xerox.
> That doesn't mean one should rabidly go after every single possible infringing use
If this protection is somehow mandatory, why not? How do I check whether I'm "protecting" a trademark enough? Maybe there's a meter somewhere? Is there a scale? What are the units of trademark protection? If there was such a rule, we'd have answers to these questions. There is no such rule.
The best case for the genericization argument in that list might be Lineoleum, but Lineoleum wasn't even a registered trademark. So that's literally the story: Guy invents Lineoleun. Product is popular, other people make the same product under the same name, he's not very happy about that so he goes to court and says hey, that's my trademark. No it isn't, you don't have a trademark.
If it becomes generic it might as well be, but that's not the issue here. Anyway, the parent post has a google jd in trademark law and doesn't know what he's talking about, but you can't enforce your TM the same way, or if at all, if has become generic.
The main way you lose tm rights is by not using the mark.
Can they? Give me examples of such trademarks being lost.
Do make sure to check your examples. Maybe you heard say that Xerox lost their trademark. Nope, Xerox® is still a registered trademark of Xerox.
> That doesn't mean one should rabidly go after every single possible infringing use
If this protection is somehow mandatory, why not? How do I check whether I'm "protecting" a trademark enough? Maybe there's a meter somewhere? Is there a scale? What are the units of trademark protection? If there was such a rule, we'd have answers to these questions. There is no such rule.