Is there anywhere I can get a complete list of former U.S. registered
trademarks that were lost (i.e., whose owners lost the trademark
rights) because the trademark became "generic" under trademark law? 
Background: In trademark law, you can't get trademark protection for a
brand name that is the generic name for the product (e.g., "Bread" as
a brand name for bread), and you can lose your trademark if it becomes so
closely associated with the product that people use your brand name
instead of the generic name for the product.  For example, some words
that used to be trademarks are: yo-yo, zipper, kerosene, aspirin,
trampoline, escalator, heroin, cellophane, thermos, nylon, fiberglass,
and linoleum.  I'm looking for a complete list.

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Request for Question Clarification by bobbie7-ga on 03 Feb 2004 18:18 PST

Hi Mickeylt!

I can provide you with a list of 23 English words that were originally
trademarks and 69 words that are often used as a "generic" but are
still trademarked.

Would my findings be of your interest?

Thanks,
Bobbie7

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Clarification of Question by mickeylt-ga on 04 Feb 2004 09:58 PST

Bobbie7 - Your list would definitely be helpful. But if you don't
mind, could you wait a day or two before posting it as an answer, just
in case another researcher comes up with a complete list?  Thanks!

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Request for Question Clarification by bobbie7-ga on 04 Feb 2004 10:03 PST

Dear Mickeylt,

That's fine with me!

Sincerely,

Bobbie7

Wikipedia has a (slightly) longer list, or Bobbie7 or I are off on our
respective counts.

I suspect our lists are substantially the same and since Bobbie7 got
here first I'll let him take it when you're satisfied nobody else can
find anything (that one was the only substantive list I found).

-Haversian

I asked both the US Patent and Trademark Office and a commercial
trademark research firm called Thomson & Thomson.  Both of them were
stymied.  The problem is that registered trademarks that were
cancelled due to their becoming generic BEFORE 1984 would not have
been entered into any electronic database of current and former
registrations.  Thus, if "cellophane" was a registered trademark at
one time and it was determined to be generic under Lanham Act Section
14(3) either through a determination made by the Trademark Trial and
Appeal Board or a federal court prior to 1984, there would be no
database records of that mark ever having been registered and
subsequently determined to be generic.  To develop a complete list,
one would have to manually search all the records at the Trademark
Office, looking for marks that were registered and then later had
there registrations cancelled due to genericism.

Note that your question specifies formerly REGISTERED trademarks.  The
various lists to which you have been directed contain words that may
have been claimed by someone to act as trademarks and which later
became generic in common usage, but that is different than having a
list of actual REGISTRATIONS that were lost due to genericism.  If you
do not need examples of actual registered marks, then sure, the
wikipedia list, although likely only anecdotal at best, will probably
work as I cannot confirm that any of them were actually ever
registered.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark.

There is one possible error in the Wikipedia list. I don't believe
that "spandex"  was ever a trademark.

Dear mvguy,

That's my point exactly.  The owners of "spandex" could certainly have
claimed it as a trademark--you do not have to register it in order for
it to be a trademark; you must only use it on goods or services. 
Thus, who are we to determine if "spandex" was ever a trademark?  As I
said in my earlier post, I cannot determine if it was ever registered,
but that does not mean that nobody ever used it an claimed it as a
trademark.  On those facts, in order for it to be deemed generic,
there would have to have been a formal determination by a federal
court that a mark was unenforceable due to its having become generic. 
Are there federal court cases declaring all of the words in the
wikipedia list to be generic?  I do not know.  That is why all of this
is mostly anecdotal.