[Baromaro]

Kuci is very effectively giving the producer point of view on the matter

However it (obviously) works both ways, and most of the time the producer benefits plenty from the trademark. Hence why they go to so much effort to defend them

Trademarks are valuable to producers basically for the reason Kuci said - people recognize them and know they're buying the correct brand of product - and because of the cost of advertising. Advertising is most effective with brand symbols as well as names (obviously), and many advertisers have spent a fortune on making their trademark symbol (whether it is a name or a logo) become well known.

PH, the reason they don't go defunct is that they don't, as long as the trademark owner continues using them, and defending their trademark from abuses. If either one is no longer true, they actually go quite quickly defunct (as opposed to Copyright, where the work is copyrighted for nearly a century even if you at no point claim copyright...)

The funniest thing about Trademarks that i've heard is from medical trademarks. It seems that any time a pharm company makes a new drug, they think of the stupidest name possible for it - one nearly impossible to say and using lots of weird letters - for its official, scientific name. Then they give it a nice, easy to say real name for its trademarked name.

Why? So that when it goes generic, nobody will be able to ask for it by its formulary name, only remembering the real name

Celebrex = "celecoxib"
Lipitor = "atorvastatin"
etc.

The names look reasonable, but are VERY hard to pronounce, generally having odd syllables in them (xib for example). There are much odder ones, i just picked the first two I could find