Wikipedia talk:Trademark notices

What is the reason for the policy that trademarks should be acknowledged with trademark notices in Wikipedia articles? I'm not an expert in this field, but to my knowledge it is not legally required to acknowledge trademarks in publications such as encyclopedias and newspapers, nor is it common practice to do so.

I would suggest that unless there is a compelling legal reason to include trademark notices, we should not do so, as they look pretty ugly and add nothing of use to the articles.

If anyone with legal expertise has views on this, it would be useful if they could talk about this issue here. Enchanter

This is a competing product.

I'm not a lawyer, but I started the trademark notices page primarily because of the potential conflict with one of our competitors (Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc). I have been acknowledging trademarks just in case EB's legal department decides to come hunt us down for giving EB credit for the articles based on EB11 text. I don't want it to come down to a dilemma between plagiarism and trademark infringement. --Damian Yerrick

I agree - Enclyclopaedia Britannica is a competing product and we should be careful to avoid misusing their trademark, and acknowledge it where appropriate.

However, the trademark notices page seems to be asking for all trademarks used anywhere in Wikipedia to be acknowledged. This might be pointless and unnecessary, and detract from articles by having ugly trademark notices all over the place.

Sometimes it might be useful to mention who owns a trademark - for example, the fact that the Church of Scientology owns and defends trademarks like Dianetics is an interesting fact and deserves to be in the article. However, statements like "Coca-Cola is a trademark of the Coca-Cola Co." don't add anything to the encyclopedia, and as far as I'm aware there is no legal reason to include them. We are not in the cola drinks business - we are just producing an encyclopedia.

Perhaps we need some better guidelines here, for example suggesting that we should only mention trademarks when they are relevant to the content of the article. Again, I'm not an expert on this - anyone else got any ideas? Enchanter

There is no (legal or moral) requirement to acknowledge trademarks. Newspapers never do it. Furthermore, adding (TM) to any mention of EB does nothing to protect us from a trademark infringement suit. You are infringing a trademark if you trick customers into believing that your product is connected to the trademark holder's product. Since we never do that, we are safe. I would like this page to be removed. At best, we can add a new rule to Rules to consider, and I would then vote against that rule. AxelBoldt, Saturday, March 30, 2002

The recent additions seems to imply that there is a legal requirement to acknowledge trademark holders when a confusion could conceivably arise. That is incorrect. You are not allowed to use a trademark in a way which could conceivably cause confusion, period. Adding a tradmark symbol does not protect you in any way. You cannot sell your sugar water as Pepsi(tm) and then attempt to cover yourself by acknowledging that Pepsi is a trademark of somebody else.

I repeat: new rules should not simply be placed into the wikipedia namespace without discussion. Either discuss them in meta or put them on the Rules to Consider list.AxelBoldt