> My home-made cola can be every bit as good as Coca-Cola, but I can’t go around calling it that way. Coca-Cola is a brand name, not a general term for a type

> My home-made cola can be every bit as good as Coca-Cola, but I can’t go around calling it that way. Coca-Cola is a brand name, not a general term for a type of drink that's been in use for hundreds of years. "Feta" is just the word that Greek people have used for the past few hundred years to refer to a range of different brined white cheeses that have been produced for thousands of years in the Eastern Mediterranean. Through an accident of history (namely, Greek immigration to Anglophone countries), the Greek word for those types of cheeses has spread around the world. If things had turned out slightly differently (for example, if large numbers of Turks had immigrated to the US in the early 20th Century), we might be calling feta cheese "sirene" or "beyaz peynir." Greece is now cashing in on that linguistic happenstance to try to force competition out of the market. > Nobody is preventing them from making any kind of cheese. They're just preventing them from marketing the cheese under its common name. It's as if one country gained a monopoly on the word "chocolate," and forced producers in other countries to invent a new name that nobody recognized.