Can I name my app using the name of a long defunct company? I am working on an app and want to name it Vidmark. Apparently, this name is the name of a long-defunct company (since 2001). Could I get into trouble using this name?
The answer is almost assuredly, no, you can't use it. Vidmark was parented as Trimark Holdings which was bought by Lionsgate in 2001. Lionsgate is still very much an active company, and has been using the Vidmark name as lately as 2017 when it released a Roku streaming channel under the "Vidmark" name. So Lionsgate is the holder of this particular trademark, and is actively using it. TESS shows that the trademark is still Live and was re-registered in 2017.
Copyright is irrelevant, because names are not protected by copyright. Trademark is relevant: a name can be protected by a trademark. &quot;Yoda&quot; is a registered trademark owned by Lucasfilms, a subsidiary of Disney. There is a list of goods and services where the property right is asserted, so for example you could get sued for peddling art books under this name. It just depends on what your business does. For instance, a plumbing business isn't competing with Lucasfilms w.r.t. that class of goods and services.
The example in the question is a pretty clear case of nominative use. The mark is being used to refer to, or name, the product (or service). It is not being used to sell a similar product, or anything else. No reasonable person could take it to indicate that the trademark owner has endorsed the person making the statement, nor that there is any sort of affiliation. This page from the International Trademark Association describes the concept. This concept is sometimes called "fair use" by analogy with the concept in US copyright law, but that term is not strictly accurate. It is better to simply say "nominative use" or "descriptive use". Digital Media Law's page on "Using the trademarks of others" says: As a general matter, if you are reporting on, commenting on, or criticizing a trademark owner, most ordinary consumers will not be confused about whether the company or organization is the source or sponsor of your work. You can reduce the likelihood of confusion further by avoiding a website design that looks like the trademark owner's site or resembles its product packaging, and you should never festoon your website with a company's logo (but isolated use when relevant to a discussion is OK) ... If someone threatens you with a lawsuit or sues you for trademark dilution, then a lack of consumer confusion will not help you. Here, one obvious line of defense is to argue that there is no likelihood of dilution. Federal and state dilution law protects a trademark owner against the whittling away of the distinctiveness of its famous trademark by association with other goods or services; it does not give a trademark owner the right to shut down all unflattering speech about it. If you do not associate a famous trademark with your own goods or services, then there can be no dilution (or at least that's how your argument goes). ... The nominative fair use defense protects your ability to use a trademark to refer to a trademark owner or its goods or services for purposes of reporting, commentary, criticism, and parody, as well as for comparative advertising. Courts impose three requirements on defendants who want to take advantage of the nominative fair use defense: (1) the trademark owner, product, or service in question must not be readily identifiable without use of the trademark; (2) the defendant must use only as much of the mark as is necessary to identify the trademark owner, product, or service; and (3) the defendant must do nothing that would suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark owner. This defense works against trademark infringement lawsuits. The federal dilution statute, found at 15 U.S.C. § 1125(c)(3)(A), also makes nominative fair use a complete defense to trademark dilution claims.
There are two &quot;cancellations&quot; here. There is a contract between the customer and the company. This contract was ended. Also, as part of GDPR obligations, the data of the former customer was removed. Now the &quot;credit&quot; part suggests a pre-paid phone, which are often described as &quot;no contract&quot;. Legally this is incorrect. There is a contractual obligation for the phone company to deliver phone services (typically expressed in minutes of call time, # of text messages and/or MB of data). Now the pre-paid contract with high likelihood had a clause which dealt with inactive accounts. For instance, the minutes of call time may expire after 5 years. A &quot;credit&quot; that has not been converted to minutes, messages, or megabytes may also expire. When this happened, the company might need to keep the customer data on their records for two more years (for legal reasons), so the 7 year period does not sound weird at all. As soon as the legal reason to retain the data has ended, the GDPR indeed states that the data should be removed. That act is not connected to the credit expiring years before.
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.
The words "proprietary format" are important. Are you sure the format is proprietary? If it is, then it's likely protected in which case they might have grounds to sue (but that does not mean they would definetly win). If the format is not proprietary, and so long as you don't share data which is proprietary then I believe you fine. I'm not a lawyer - but I cite GIF files as an example. They were still protected by the US and some other countries until at least the late 90s and there were various threats to open source linux companies who shared code that used the file format. I'm not aware of anything other than threats and never heard of any company being sued, let alone winning or losing. Another example that comes to mind is the RedHat ISO format. My understanding is RedHat could not stop anyone from sharing open source, but they could prevent folks from sharing the format they assembled and shared the open source. Again, I am not sure if it was ever tested in any court of law anywhere.
Yes you can. The pieces of information you are going to include are facts. Facts are not copyrightable. The names will be trademarks but you will not be pretending to have any connection with them, so just using them for reference is fine.
Generally speaking, trademark law does not allow to reserve a trademark for future use for an extended period of time (like five years), without using it. A trademark arises from use in commerce or imminent intended future use in commerce.