Can I market a legal food product with the name of an illicit drug or other illegal product? Say I've reverse-engineered the Coca-Cola formula, or produced something very similar in taste. Since the recipe is not patented, I can sell my product so long as I don't market it as Coke, Coca-Cola, etc. Say this formula is deemed safe and has been approved by the FDA and any other regulatory body. In particular, it does not include cocaine. Would I be allowed to market this product as &quot;Cocaine cola&quot; or &quot;Cocaine soda?&quot; To sidestep the potential trademark issue, could I name an independently conceived product after a drug? Going a step beyond saying it's &quot;like crack&quot; and instead saying naming a brand of potato chips &quot;edible meth&quot; or similar? Edit: Specifically would there be a problem when marketing food?
Would I be allowed to market this product as &quot;Cocaine cola&quot; or &quot;Cocaine soda?&quot; england-and-wales Possibly not if you were to try and register the name, as this may well fall foul of s.3(3)(a), Trademarks Act 1994 which says: A trade mark shall not be registered if it is— (a) contrary to public policy or to accepted principles of morality... The government's Manual of Trade Marks Practice, at section 5.8, explains that: Marks which may be ‘contrary to public policy’ are those, for example, that make specific references to illegal drugs such as cocaine... (my emphasis)
united-states No, the first-sale doctrine makes this unenforceable Once a product is sold to a retail consumer, it is generally theirs to do with as they wish, including reselling it. The company likely intends this restriction to apply to distributors/retailers with whom it has contracts: it would likely be a violation of their distribution contract to, say, open a 12-pack of Coke and sell the individual cans. An exception to this doctrine is licensed software. Because it is licensed and not sold, there's not a product that the consumer could legally resell; the license is not required to be transferrable. As far as license agreements to prevent this go, it's been tried: Lexmark sold toner cartridges with a patent license agreement banning refilling and reuse. It ended up at the Supreme Court in Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc., where Lexmark lost.
Not only can’t you trademark it, you can’t use it The original logo is covered by copyright which belongs, prima facie, to the original artist. It doesn’t matter that they are based in Russia; Russia and the US are both signatories to the Berne Convention which means they protect each other’s copyright. That means you can only use it if it is fair use (it isn’t) or if you have the copyright owner’s permission (you don’t). Could I still use the logo I bought and trademark it in the US granted that the seller had made some revisions to the stock photo he found? Not if the seller didn’t have permission to make those changes. Creation of a derivative work is one of the exclusive rights copyright gives. The seller had changed up some parts of the stock image, this includes color scheme, orientation, and made the picture look a little low poly. See above. The original artist of the stock photo is based in Russia and as far as I can see there is no registered copyright on it and don't think they could apply for US copyright anyway. They already have copyright. They would need to register it in the US before they could sue but there is no impediment to them doing so. While I'm not sure where the seller (located in Pakistan) officially downloaded the logo, I had nothing to do with the final design of it or downloaded anything from a stock photo website myself, so I'm not sure if I'd be bounded by any terms of the stock photo website Makes no difference. Just because you didn’t steal the car, that doesn’t make it ok for you to drive it. The stock image is very niche and a bit random. Across all the websites the artist has published it on, it has about 5 or 6 downloads altogether. Not relevant at all. As far the copyright of the seller's work goes, the Fiverr terms state that buyers have all the copyright, though I don't know if this is nullified by the use of the stock image. You can’t sell something you don’t own. If the seller had no right to upload the photo (as it seems they didn’t), the terms of the website don’t matter. The true owner never agreed to those terms and isn’t bound by them.
No. A trademark is specific to an industry or type of products or services. And, while it is virtually impossible to get a new trade name with a three letter acronym because almost all of them are taken, three words that start with the same letters as a three letter acronym is not infringement on the acronym. You might very well be infringing if you used &quot;I.B.M.&quot; to sell computer equipment. But, &quot;Internal brilliance method&quot;, spelled out, would not infringe I.B.M., even in the computer equipment industry, and &quot;I.B.M.&quot; in the food service industry, for example, would not be trademark infringement on the International Business Machines&quot; trademark of &quot;I.B.M.&quot; for good and services of the type that it offers.
Under US law: It depends, but it is likely legal. Trademark is designed to prevent confusion in consumers, to avoid someone's good work and reputation from being taken advantage of by another, and/or damaged by another's poor work/service. The game's name and character names are (generally) not trademarked, nor are they copyrightable. Even if they were, there is nominative fair use to consider as a defense. There are still some legal issues that might occur (e.g. this does not apply to the novel's name; using the game's logo on cover art might constitute trademark violation if it was so positioned as to be associating a relationship with the game publisher, descriptions of the game's content, especially story content, is a bit hazy), but not with using the game name or character names.
Intellectual property law varies considerably by jurisdiction, and doesn't just involve copyright, but also trademarks, and patents. The first problem you are going to run into is that "Risko!" is probably protected as a commercial trademark rather than copyright. In the US at least, making minor changes to a trademark generally doesn't get you off the hook for unlicensed use. The owner of the "Risko!" trademark could bring suit against you for trademark infringement and it would be up to a judge or possibly a jury to decide whether "Risko" is different enough from "Risko!" that confusion would be unlikely. If they won the suit they could collect damages and their legal costs. There was a protracted and important trademark lawsuit in the US over the names "Monopoly" and "Anti-Monopoly" for board games. An economist, Ralph Anspach, had introduced a game he called "Anti-monopoly". He was sued by the Parker Brothers company for infringing on their trademark for "Monopoly". After 10 years the US Supreme Court ruled in Anspach's favor, finding that "Monopoly" had become a generic term for a type of board game and was no longer a valid trademark. You can't necessarily count on being "small potatoes" so that they'll simply ignore your possible infringement. In US law, failure to enforce their trademark rights can lead to the loss of trademark rights and remedies, so companies are less likely to let minor infringements slide. The situation in Italy may be different. Your artwork and graphical components are another potential problem. Those probably are covered by copyright. Again, the holder of the copyright for the "Risko!" artwork could sue you for violating their copyright on the artwork. A judge or jury would then evaluate whether your artwork was "derivative" of the "Risko!" artwork. If the court finds that your artwork is derivative, you might have to pay damages and legal costs. There are actually a ton of Risk inspired games already available online, but they seem to stay away from names that sounds anything like "Risk" and anything that looks like the Risk artwork.
Reviewing https://stackexchange.com/legal/trademark-guidance shows the following: The logos associated with Stack Exchange Inc. and any Stack Exchange site are a trademark. The purpose of trademark law is to prevent consumers from being misled as to the origin of a product. So if you were making a product, and you used a Stack Exchange name or logo in your product (or in its advertising) in such a way that would mislead someone into thinking that your product was owned by, operated by, endorsed by, or in any way part of Stack Exchange Inc., you would be violating the trademark and this would not be legal. Our logo images and site names are copyrighted. Any content on the Stack Exchange Network not contributed by users is copyrighted. Copyright is different than trademark. Ordinarily you couldn't copy it. But if you were writing a news story or blog post about a Stack Exchange site, reproducing the logo image would almost certainly be considered &quot;fair use&quot; and allowed under trademark law because you were not using it &quot;in trade.&quot; So the answer to your question is yes, you would need to seek the permission of the trademark holder.
Yes. There is no requirement that a company name be accurately descriptive. One could call such a company &quot;Horror and Fury Brewing&quot; if one chose to, or &quot;Joe's Eats&quot;. Such a name might well reduce book sales, but there is no law against poor business decisions. As long as the name does not violate any existing trademarks, it should be OK unless there is some specific law in the local jurisdiction that regulates company names, which seems unlikely.