How are programming books written if language names are trademarked? For example, you might want to talk about Java, but Java and its mother company Oracle are trademark names. Or you want to mention the Spring framework which is a registered trademark. Or mentioning Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Facebook as technology companies. How do trademark laws apply when one wants to write a programming book and needs to use these names of languages, frameworks, or companies inside the book, all trademarks.
This is a case of nominative use. In general, it is fine to use trademarks to refer to the products trademarked, provided that a reasonable person would not be confused about who creates or provides the product, and would not think that the trademark holder has endorsed, authorized, or sponsored the book or other product that refers to the trademark. It is common to include a disclaimer stating that trademarks are owned by specific parities, and the author or publisher is not claiming them, nor claiming any endorsement or affiliation. Such a disclaimer makes the nominative function of the trade mark use clearer, and would make it harder for the trademark owner to prevail in an infringement suit. See This law.se question and answer for more info.
You probably can. There are a few questions here. First, is the message protected by copyright? In general, it probably is, but there are many exceptions that might allow you to use it without permission. Unfortunately, these exceptions vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The exceptions tend to allow the use of small excerpts of a work for various sorts of purposes that don't undermine the copyright holder's ability to profit. That leads to the second question, which is why you are using that message. If you're including it in your source code so you can test whether a message generated at run time is in fact that message, that's one thing, and it's probably okay. On the other hand, if the owner of the copyright sells a database of all its message strings, and you're compiling a similar database that you also intend to sell, that's probably not okay. A third question concerns the Firefox license terms. It's entirely possible that they allow you explicitly to do what you're considering, in which case it doesn't matter what copyright law says about it. On the other hand, Firefox is open source software, and under some open source licenses, if you incorporate any of the source code in your own product, you are required to release your product's source code under the same license. If you're not already planning to do that, you should consider carefully whether including that error message would trigger that provision (if there is one) of Firefox's open source license.
Copyright The © copyright symbol (or equivalently the word &quot;copyright&quot; or the abbreviation &quot;copyr&quot;, the actual symbol does not have to be used and is an abbreviation itself, or ℗ for a sound recording copyright) is used exclusively to claim copyright for yourself. If the copyright holder fails to do so, the copyright holder loses certain rights. Specifically, notice makes it much harder for a defendant to establish that that the alleged infringer-defendant is an &quot;innocent infringer&quot; and thereby is subject to a much lower minimum on statutory damages. Trademarks and Service Marks A trademark holder also secures certain rights by putting people on notice of the existence of a claim of trademark with the appropriate symbol (® if it is registered trademark or service mark, and tm for trademark or sm for service mark, if it is not a principle register mark under the Lanham Act). The various trademark symbols when used by a third party are being used in a circumstance when the third party isn't using it to sell the trademarked good in a manner that acknowledges that the trademark belongs to someone else and is protected in much the same way that an academic might footnote an idea or quotation to attribute that idea or quotation to someone else. Aside from the academic/journalistic honesty idea of acknowledging and attributing something that is not yours to someone else, it could also protect you from a trademark dilution lawsuit. If a trademark is used without attribution as a generic term for everything in the same class of goods that the goods sold under the trademark belongs to, it will become diluted and come to have only the general meaning of something belonging to that class of goods and not the specific secondary meaning associated with a trademark of a particular good within that class which is sold by the trademark owner. For example, if everyone started using the word &quot;Nike&quot; without a trademark symbol to refer to running shoes even if they weren't made by the Nike company, the trademark &quot;Nike&quot; would become diluted and no longer be protected by the law. But, the Nike company can nip that process in the bud by bringing anti-dilution suits against people who use the term in the general sense rather than to refer only to goods made by them. When you acknowledge with a trademark symbol that the right to use the name to sell goods is limited to them selling their goods, you are weakening the case that someone who wanted to bring an anti-dilution suit against you would have and clarifying that you are using it to refer to their goods (which is proper) rather than to sell goods which are not theirs (which is improper).
In Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 593 U.S. ___ (2021), the US Supreme Court addressed the reproduction of a subset of the Java API. The majority assumed for the sake of argument that the Java API was protected by copyright, but went on to hold that the reproduction was a fair use. We shall assume, but purely for argument’s sake, that the entire Sun Java API falls within the definition of that which can be copyrighted. We shall ask instead whether Google’s use of part of that API was a “fair use.” Unlike the Federal Circuit, we conclude that it was. So, it is an open question whether an API is protected by copyright, but the precedent from the Federal Circuit will be persuasive authority. The Federal Circuit held that the API is protected by copyright and the Supreme Court did not upset that conclusion. Second, the factors that led the court to conclude the reproduction of part of the Java API was fair use could turn out another way in another fact scenario. Some of the reasoning seems to generalize, but some seems specific to the Java development ecosystem. Briefly, the court recognized: API authorship is a creative process, but is &quot;functional in nature&quot; The reproduction was intended to assist interoperability; it was commercial; there was no evidence of bad faith The amount of code taken was a small amount of the entire Java work, an amount consistent with its goals The market harms to Oracle were dubious My prediction is that there will continue to be significant case-by-case uncertainty as to the applicability of the fair-use defence in this context.
As you've presented them, I doubt the functions are protected by copyright in the first place. Originality is one of the threshold requirements for copyright protection, and it demands that the work in question be independently created by the author, and that it possess some minimal degree of creativity. If you're talking about programming at a level so basic that the function truly must be created in a particular way, there is no originality in simply following the instructions. And even if there's some wiggle room, but the language you used has likely been independently replicated by many programmers, that's still not original enough to be copyrightable. What you want to watch out for, though, is the possibility that they've been combined into an original arrangement that is protected. I don't know enough about how copyright law is applied to code to say where or how that line is drawn, but my instinct would be that it could be a fairly low threshold.
In the US at least, copyright does not normally protect titles and other short phrases, they are considered not original enough. (See the US Copyright office Circular #33). However, titles, brand names, and slogans may be protected as trademarks, as may logos. A trademark is a word, phrase or symbol used to identify goods or services to customers and others. They key issue in a trademark case is: &quot;might reasonable people be confused into falsely attributing the infringing item with the trademarked item, or into thinking that is is associate, endorsed, or sponsored by the makers of the trademarked item, or comes from the same source&quot;. When the name is the same and the general area and genre is similar, trademark protection seems plausible. Marvel is known to be quite protective of its IP, and might well have trademarked such a title. A successful suit by a trademark owner could lead to an injunction (a court order) against future use of the infringing m,ark, and significant money damages, depending on the detailed facts. A name such as &quot;Black Pirate&quot; is fairly generic, and might not receive much protection. On the other hand, if that name has become associated with a detailed and specific character or content, it might have acquired a &quot;secondary meaning&quot; and be more strongly protected. Consulting an experienced trademark lawyer or other expert might well be a very good idea.
No This summarizes the situation with Disney specifically. The Disney trademarks are so ubiquitous and recognizable as being Disney's and not, for example, yours that your use is bound to create confusion in the minds of the public that your business is in some way associated with Disney. That is the essence of trademark infringement. In particular, where your business has nothing to do with the characters it is clear that you are only using them for the cachet of the Disney reputation. Disney will defend their trademarks - this is not at all unlikely.
If it's patented then it doesn't matter that you independently came up with it. Most software is not patented, though. Most developers do not even think about patents when writing code. In theory you could spend your time keeping up to date on software patents so that you avoid infringing. But this probably only makes sense for specialists who would want to read the latest patents in their field anyway. All software is protected by literary copyright, though. In this case they will try to prove that you did not independently created it, and did copy it. Whelan v. Jaslow in 1986 ruled that structure, sequence and organization of a computer program were protected by copyright. So you could be liable even if you did not just copy and paste sections of code. But even if you're worried the court would get things wrong and think you copied a program when you never even saw it in the first place, there is really nothing you can do about it.