Can a developer use someone else&#39;s product name as an Open Source project name? Suppose that an open source developer wants to use the product name ninjago owed by Lego for the name of an Open Source project. Is it allowed to base the project name on Lego brand? Also can the developer create a unique logo for this open source project that will look kind of similar or has some kind of reference to Lego product? Or is even a name protected?
united-states Trademark law varies somewhat from country to country, and the set of protected trademarks varies a lot from one country to another. In this answer I shall consider primarily US law, although I will try to make the answer as wide ranging as I can. What trademark law protects is the identification of a source of goods or services, and the associated reputation an good will. By using a trademark that is identical to or confusingly similar to an exiting mark, one may be relying to some extent on the reputation of the existing brand. Unless done with permission, this is unfair, and is generally not allowed. However, the protection of a trademark is normally limited to a product or service of the same kind as the existing mark. So suppose one firm registered &quot;GreenCall&quot; as the name of a smartphone service. Another firm wanting to use &quot;Greencall&quot; as the name of a wine would probably not be infringing on the first firm's trademark, and could not be successfully sued. (They might well be sued, however, and need to spend significant money defending their mark.) In some countries, only registered trademarks get any protection. In others, such as the US, use of a mark without registration will provide some protection, but not as much as registration does. In the US at least,a well-known or &quot;famous&quot; mark gets addition protection, even outside the category where it has been registered and used. What counts as &quot;famous&quot; is ultimately a decision fo the US Patent and Trademark office (USPTO) to make. A toy line set in a fantasy world would seem like a rather different category than an open-source project, unless the project was a game with similar elements. The farther and more obviously different the project might be from the toy line, the less likely the use of the same name would be to be held a trademark infringement. Since the Lego mark is used not only on toys, but on a successful TV series, a movie, a video game, and a theme park, it might be held to be a &quot;well-known&quot; mark, and be protected even in categories it is not used in. Actually the project being an open-source one would make no significant difference here. Open source project and commercial products follow the same trademark rules. However, even if the category is different enough that the use of the same name is ultimately held not to be trademark infringement, it is not unlikely that the trademark owner would take legal action, and the developer or development group would need to spend money on legal fees at n early stage of the project. It might be wiser to choose a more clearly distinctive name. It might also be wise to consult a lawyer with trademark expertise. As to the logo, if the logo in some way &quot;looks similar&quot; to an existing logo, it might be held to be a derivative work, and thus a copyright infringement. This is a highly fact-dependent judgement call.
Yes, the original designer (or the designer's employer) would have a legal right to the design, insofar as it included protectable design elements. Copyright on the design of &quot;useful&quot; products is limited, and the exact limitations vary from country to country. However, it might be hard for the designer (or the company for which the designer works) to prove that the creation was original, and was not an actual leak. But if the designer or company has retained sufficient evidence to convince a court, then a suit could be successful. Such a possibility makes me doubt that Apple or a similar large company would do that. The risks are too great when a design of their own creation would probably be quite good enough for their purposes. But that is all speculation.
You're not going to find an OSI-approved or FSF-approved license that meets your needs because these licenses comply with the OSI definition or FSF definition of open-source software, and your requirements don't. Looking at your requirements, it looks like you want a license where users can modify the software and use it for private use, but cannot use it for commercial use. I ran a search on TL;DR Legal to see what licenses match. There are some one-off licenses that appear to be written by individuals or groups or written by companies that explicitly call out a particular software package. One appears to be a modification of the Apache License. I wouldn't recommend simply using one of these without not only reading them thoroughly yourself, but also consulting a lawyer - just because they started with a license that is trusted doesn't mean that a change they made didn't cause problems if it were to be challenged. For a project hosted on GitHub, it doesn't need to be open-source. You can upload a project that is all rights reserved, but by using GitHub, you do need to allow others to view and fork your repository. However, I wouldn't expect many outside contributors. Why should I give you my hard work if you're just going to turn around and make money on it? That's essentially free labor. I'm not aware of any listing of vetted licenses that are designed for commercial use of software, like how the OSI and FSF maintain lists of licenses. There is a Binpress license generator, but again, it's not a vetted license. How much stake you put into license generator or some random license you find on the Internet is up to you and the level of risk that you find acceptable. If you want to make money on your open-source software, you may want to rethink your approach. In my experience, I've usually seen dual licensing achieve this. One license is a custom written commercial license while the other is a very strong copyleft license, like GPL or AGPL (depending on how you intend your software to be used), which forces companies to also open-source their software if they use yours. It doesn't explicitly prevent commercial usage, but many companies will either look for an alternative that has a more permissive license or purchase the commercial license to prevent their software from being required to be open-source as well. You may also be interested in questions on Open Source about how to monetize open-source projects. There are options out there - selling support and maintenance or related services or selling additional documentation or examples. Under this model, all of your software is free and open source under any of the well-known open-source software licenses, but you make money supporting users of the software.
I agree that you have a very strong copyright fair use case. Although the logo is creative and you're using the entire thing, your use is for a nonprofit educational purpose and does not affect the value of the work. The logo is also probably trademarked. But you aren't using the mark in commerce, so I don't think that will be a problem for you.
Whoever "derived" the illegal derivative work most likely has copyright in his derivations, unless they are not worth copyright protections. Say I take the Harry Potter books and add a few chapters and try to sell it - that's copyright infringement of course, but I have the copyright on these additional chapters. However, I don't have the right to allow you to copy the derived work. And even if you have the right to copy the original work, you don't have the right to copy the derived work because it is a different work. I could extract my changes, and allow you to take them and do with them what you like. You could then create an illegally derived work yourself. I couldn't sue you, but the original copyright holder could. To the comments: One, a work and a derivative of the work are not the same, so even if you have the right to make a copy of a work, that doesn’t give you any right whatsoever to copy a derivative work - they are not the same work. Two, the copyright holder has the exclusive right to control copying and the creation of derivative works. If the copyright holder doesn’t want derivatives to exist, then creating them, copying them etc. is always copyright infringement.
If you are utilizing the name of the characters just so users can rate them (by rate - I mean rank, review, critique) you should be fine. Copyrights are subject to "fair use" by the public. For purposes such as review, criticism, and comment - this is generally considered to be fair use. Is the site commercial or for-profit? That could impact the analysis, but only if you are making money flowing from the use of the actual copyrighted material(s), rather than advertising (like Adsense) or something similar (this should not suggest that those type sites cannot violate copyright, but it's part of the analysis). If it is something you are investing money into creating, you may want to get a formal legal opinion. But if the site if for fun, or hobby, you are likely fine if what's described is the only use. http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/copyright-fair-use-and-how-it-works-for-online-images/ This link is to a great, easy to read and understand article on fair use, what it is and what it allows. Keep in mind each case is fact intensive, however, from what you are describing this seems fine.
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.
Apparently not The full text of the license is not included on the page you link to, or on any linked page that I checked. But the FAQ says: free educational licenses can be used strictly for non-commercial educational purposes (including academic research). Exactly how this company defines &quot;non-commercial educational purposes&quot; is not stated. If work is done on a student project, and after a non-student license is purchased that project is commercialized, would the license have been violated, and if so, would the company be likely to sue? The fist question cannot be answered without the full text of the license, and the second would require reading the minds of the company officials. But it seems reasonably clear that this is not what the company has in mind. Another user has pointed out a link to the actual license terms which I failed to note. Section 3.1 of the license says, in relevant part: ... JetBrains grants You a non-exclusive and non-transferable right to use each Product covered by the Toolbox Subscription for non-commercial, educational purposes only (including conducting academic research or providing educational services) ... This would seem to confirm what the FAQ quoted above says. It is hard to see how any development intended as an eventual commercial product would be covered under such a license term. It would appear that a regular non-student license would be needed for such use.