Can I use internal components&#39; logo on my product? I want to manufacture and sell an electronic device which I made using some TI components at home. Can I use TI's logo and other logos such as 'Burr-Brown audio' and their names on my product packaging?
You will need to obtain permission from the company whose logo you intend to use before using it. Just because you use a product from that company in your devices doesn't necessarily give you permission to use their logo. Many companies have co-marketing plans that you can apply to be a part of but generally you and your product must meet certain requirements in order to be a part of it.
You have misunderstood the MIT license. The MIT license requires you to include a copy of &quot;the above copyright notice and this permission notice&quot; in &quot;all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&quot; However, this is not the same as requiring you to offer the Software under those terms, and in fact the MIT license explicitly permits you to sublicense the Software under different terms (&quot;including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software&quot;). If you had to offer the Software under the same terms, then the sublicense right would be extinguished, so that cannot be the correct reading of the license. Therefore, you can do exactly what you describe, releasing the software under the GPL. In other words, you have to include the permission notice, but you are expressly permitted to wrap it in terms that state &quot;these permissions don't apply to you, dear end user, but only to people who go and download the original from the upstream source.&quot; That's what &quot;sublicense&quot; means. The Free Software Foundation, which publishes the GPL, agrees with this analysis (although they recommend avoiding the phrase &quot;MIT License&quot; because MIT has offered software under other licenses).
With the additional information in the comment, the approach most likely to give you a good outcome would be to present this as a dispute between the retailler and the manufacturer. Make a note of who said what and when, and try to obtain written confirmation from the retailler. It sounds like the retailler is currently on your side, which makes your position stronger as your legal contract is with them and they will have obligations under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 (I'm assuming you bought the item as a private individual and not as a business). Note that you may not have a right to replacement. Consumer protection legislation and warranty terms include several ways the supplier can provide redress (usually repair / refund / replace). Since the preference is replacement, you will not be able to argue an inherent design fault with the product. This may give the manufacturer the opportunity to assert that the retailler, or you, specified an incorrect fitting kit - or that it was incorrectly installed. If the fittings were supplied with the foil, you could argue that it was an issue with these that led to total loss of the rest of the foil. It looks like you currently have grounds to claim this against the retailler. If there's no satisfactory resolution, consulting the Citizens Advice bureau would be a good place to start.
While I agree that the license required for your use case isn't particularly obvious to me, the page you have linked to includes the following paragraph: Need help picking your license? Just shoot us an email at themes@getbootstrap.com and we’ll help you decide which license makes sense for your needs! So in this case, my recommendation would be to get in touch as described, that way you will know for sure that you are properly licensed.
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.
You can licence your copyright under as many licences as you like to as many people as you like It's your copyright - you can do what you want with it. What you can't do is give someone an exclusive licence and then give licences to others - that would be a breach of contract with the exclusive licensee. How you let people know about the available licences is also up to you - your bio on Stack Exchange is fine.
If you develop a program yourself and it wasn't a work made for hire, then the program is yours to do with as you please. You hold the copyright to it. Many developers choose existing licencing arrangements or they can choose to create a license on their own, or using an attorney. And sometimes they choose to release their programs into the public domain. If you release it into the public domain, you are essentially giving up your copyright. The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) you used to develop your program does not dictate what licenses you can use. There are some existing licenses that others use (which you are free to use or NOT to use) give varying protections to you regarding what you are allowing others to do; right of others to copy, right of others to modify, right of others to distribute, rights to sub-licence, and so on. One of the licensing schemes is the GNU General Public License (GPL). But there are many others, too many to list here.
It's more likely a trademark problem than copyright but it's not easy to identify which legal theory the mark owner would use to enforce compliance with their rules. My first thought was initial interest confusion. But if a person sees the logo what are they going to confuse it with? It's not a typical case where an infringing competitor uses the other's trademark to confuse buyers into buying the infringer's goods. Perhaps if buyers are confused they might NOT click a link because they don't recognize it. In this case Facebook loses a click. But they don't have a right that click so that's a stretch also. The misuse they claim is probably dilution. If someone makes a particularly crappy modification it could be argued that this tarnishes the brand. No confusion is needed for dilution, all that is required is that the mark must be "famous" and used by the infringer in way that causes the dilution of the distinctive quality of the mark. This is known as tarnishment. Tarnishment occurs when the plaintiff's trademark is likened to products of low quality, or is portrayed in a negative context. Deere &amp; Co. v. MTD Prods., 41 F.3d 39, 43 (2d Cir. 1994). See Louis Vuitton vs Chewy Vuiton where Louis Vittuon lost when Chewy Vuiton got summary judgment. ...the Federal Trademark Dilution Act (FTDA), 15 U.S.C. § 1125(c)... provides that the owner of a famous mark can enjoin "another person's commercial use in commerce of a mark or trade name, if such use begins after the mark has become famous and causes dilution of the distinctive quality of the mark. But the Supreme Court has held that the dilution statute "unambiguously requires a showing of actual dilution, rather than a likelihood of dilution." Moseley v. Secret Catalogue, Inc., 537 U.S. 418, 433, 123 S. Ct. 1115, 155 L. Ed. 2d 1 (2003) So this requires that messing with logos actually diminishes a brand and that the company can prove it. I don't know of a case where any of these social media companies tried to enforce their rules. I came across a few blog posts about these rules indicating that the authors had contacted the companies, asking about enforcement theories; no social media company had replied to any of those bloggers.