Do claimless advertisements need to have disclaimers? My question concerns the requirement for advertisements to carry a disclaimer stating that they are advertisements, specifically in the United States. According to the FTC (though not in these words), an advertisement delivered through a trusted medium, such as the words of a celebrity or the side of an email client, has financial incentive to exaggerate the effectiveness of the product. Therefore, ads can mislead the public by using the trust in the medium to present the biased claims as truth, if it is not made clear that the information was sponsored and therefore may not be entirely unbiased. Obviously, if a blogger publishes a blog post stating that he or she used a given product and lost X amount of weight in Y amount of time, and this blogger received compensation from the maker of the product for this blog post, it would be misleading not to disclose that this was a paid advertisement. However, what about ads that make no claims whatsoever? If a Coca Cola employee were to spray paint the Coke logo onto a telephone booth, this could encourage people nearby to drink more Coke, but there was no disputable claim made. Not only that, but a similar situation could happen organically as well, if say a supermarket marked its beverage aisle with the Coke logo. There's no claim, no possible source of exaggeration, simply an image, and the assumption that it will increase sales. Does this logo on the telephone booth then need a disclaimer? The same logic could be extended to the giant advertisements in Times Square in NYC, which often do not feature claims, just branding.
As a preliminary matter: there is no, so far as I'm aware, a blanket FTC requirement that every ad carry a disclaimer or a label. Some FTC rules do require disclaimers in certain circumstances. This document gives some background. In summary: if a claim made in an ad is false, a disclaimer can't fix it. If it is true, a disclaimer is unnecessary. A disclaimer only comes into play if the ad is true, but contains a potentially misleading implication. So, for example: "In a survey, 4 out of 5 doctors recommended our product." If 4 out of 5 doctors actually recommended some other product, no disclaimer will help you. If the survey was taken in 1901, or the only choice was between your product and being eaten by wolverines, you will need to disclose that fact prominently in your ad. One of the most commonly encountered disclosure requirements, and one you mention in your question, are disclosures related to endorsements and testimonials. The endorsement rules are set out in this document, but in general, it's the same deal: if there's something about the endorsement that would qualify it in the mind of a person evaluating whether to buy the product, then you need to disclose that. This is why you see disclaimers such as: Stating that people praising a product are actors, not real users of the product Stating that celebrities are paid endorsers, not just enthusiastic users of the product If you post something on your personal blog raving about a product, for instance, and don't disclose that you were paid to say nice things about the product, that could be a violation. There are more good examples at the link above. The common ground in all of these situations is that the advertisement or endorsement is in some way actually or potentially misleading. If you run an ad that is not misleading in any way--for example, just a poster with the product logo or a non-informational tag line ("Coke: It's A Beverage!"), there is no need for a disclaimer that I'm aware of.
Generally you can only use logos (i.e., symbolic trademarks) if you have the trademark owners' permission. You may certainly use the names Cisco and Microsoft nominatively, although they might ask you to provide a disclaimer of any affiliation including sponsorhip or approval, if it gets to them. "Not making any money" is also not the sole determinative factor in proving your defense of "fair use".
This is a legal question, a business question, and an ethical question more than it is a bike question. Obviously there are risks when anyone rides a bike. And some people might have invisible conditions that would place them at special risk when riding a bike. But, as a shop owner, if a special risk is immediately visible, you open yourself up to a charge of negligence if you fail to take that risk into account. This happened in Canada, and I'm not knowledgeable about Canadian law. It's also interesting that this happened at a Giant company store, not a mom-and-pop bike shop. The fact that the store is operated by Giant may have made the operator more liability-conscious, but it also means they were better prepared to deal with liability than a mom-and-pop store. If I were in the position of selling a bike to someone who exceeds its load rating, I might want them to sign a document acknowledging that fact, and indemnifying me for any damage or injury sustained as a result, but I wouldn't make them promise to lose weight. But I'm in the USA, not Canada, and jurisdiction matters.
The store is, as far as i can see, not using the trademarked image to sell their cake. Your family does not intend to sell anything at all. This photo, from the description, could not reasonably be confused with an official image from the trademark holder. (all of this is based on your description, of course). Therefore, the trademark holder probably won't sue for trademark infringement, even if they somehow heard of this event, and if they did sue, they would quite likely lose. You would be making a copy of a presumably copyrighted image. You might have an active defense, but that is very hard to be sure of in advance. (Note that "fair use" is a very specifically US legal concept, and would not apply in the UK. The roughly comparable concept is "fair dealing" but that is more restrictive, and follows somewhat different rules.) In any case, it is possible that the rights holder would sue, and if the situation were a bit different (the was only one person pictured, making the shirt with the protected image very prominent, for example) there might be a larger chance of such a suit being successful. No business is going to want a bakery department manager deciding whether a particular use of a particular image does or does not infringe IP rights, and whether it does or does not expose the business to significant risk. Just to get an opinion from their lawyer on whether this image infringes would probably cost them several times the price of the cake with image printing. The store has no doubt written its guidelines to err well on the side of caution, because one suit, even if they won, would cost far more than the profits of many cakes, and if they lost, could have a very negative effect on their bottom line indeed. The store is entitled to restrict what business it does to keep itself safe from lawsuits. It is going to keep well on the cautious side, in all likelihood, and so it should. I fear you will have to find a store with a different policy, or use a different picture.
For paper contracts there are even statutory &quot;prominence&quot; requirements, generally applicable to &quot;disclaimers&quot;: see this Q&amp;A (using local talent), based on UCC §2-316. In a given jurisdiction there will be various contexts where a disclaimer must be made prominently such as in Washington this one regulating life insurance contracts that there must be a &quot;prominent statement that the contract does not provide cash surrender values if such is the case&quot;. &quot;Onerous contract&quot; is taken to be an accounting term about costing too much to comply, and I assume (from recent context) that you don't mean that specialized usage. This article goes through US law in terms of website agreements, which are one kind of &quot;fine print&quot;: the points here apply to paper contracts as well. If the terms are not physically in &quot;the agreement&quot;, they they must be incorporated by reference, thus &quot;some reference must be in the contract that the customer actually sees it&quot;, see E.J. Rogers, Inc. v. UPS, 338 F. Supp. 2d 935. Various cases address the amount of notice required (Manasher v. NECC: must &quot;indicate a clear intent that the provisions would be considered part of the agreement&quot;). International Star Registry of Illinois v. Omnipoint Marketing clearly established that a signed paper contract can refer to online terms (url provided, a &quot;have read and agree...&quot; statement above the physical signature). For clickwrap contracts, see Hugger-Mugger, L.L.C. v. NetSuite – clicking agree means that you are held to have read and understood the terms, as long as the terms meet the standard for incorporation by reference. The central requirement of notice is that there has to be a clear indication that the external document is incorporated into the contract, and the party must be clearly told where that document is. While a seller / service-provider can change the terms of a contract, those changes do not automatically apply to an existing party to an earlier version – Douglas v. US District Court, 495 F.3d 1062 and references therein – unless the customer is actively notified of a change in terms. As far as I know, there is no case law establishing a computational specification of what it means to &quot;notify&quot; a customer of incorporated terms. There are plenty of terrible web pages where links go nowhere (can fine print be in invisible ink?). One might assume that a diligent customer would trace all of the relevant documents to see what they agreed to if they are told that they must agree to these non-existent terms. One might also assume that since there is nothing there, agreeing to a null document adds nothing to the contract, and the vendor bears the responsibility for making the terms actually findable, though they bear no responsibility for making sure the customer looked.
It is conceivable that A's employer would claim that the intellectual property was actually created by A in the course of their employment rather than B. That would be a question of fact for the lawsuit to determine. Realistically, assuming A and B both testify that B created the intellectual property with no input from A and A's employer had only the IP address as evidence, it is pretty unlikely that the fact finder would find that A created the intellectual property. A's employer would almost certainly need to provide some additional evidence that would show that the balance of probabilities favored the employer's position (i.e. A works at FedEx writing software for package logistics, B is a 12 year old kid with no formal computer science training, and the intellectual property in question involves the implementation of sophisticated graph traversal algorithms that would be common in package logistics applications).
The rule on a tagline is really not significantly different from that on a logo, or brand name. If anywhere in the packaging, advertising, or promotion of a product or service, a registered or protected trademark of another is used, without permission from the holder, in such a way that a reasonable consumer might plausible believe that the product is made by the same maker, or comes from the same source, as the product associated with the trademark, or that the product has been approved or endorsed or sponsored by the mark holder, that would be trademark infringement. Phrases such as &quot;inspired by&quot; or &quot;google-style&quot; might have such an effct, depending on the whole of the circumstances. A disclaimer, such as &quot;This film is in no way approved or enforced by the creators of Star Wars, it merely uses similar ideas&quot; might, if sufficiently prominent, help avoid possible confusion. Comparative advertising such as &quot;far more exciting than Star Wars ever was&quot; generally makes it clear that the item is not endorsed, and indeed is to some extent competitive. That is generally considered an example of nominative use and is not infringement. But the more similarity is implied, the more consumer confusion is invited, and the more the new product seems to trade on the reputation of the established product. That is exactly what a trademark is intended to prevent.
Yes. Art 13 requires you to provide “the identity and the contact details of the controller”. You are the data controller. Your name and address are necessary to establish your identity. Using AdSense means you're offering an internet society service commercially. In that case, there's also probably some EU fair competition directive that was implemented in your countries national law and will provide equivalent requirements. For example, my country Germany has a far-reaching Impressumspflicht. Not sure if this is the most relevant EU law, but Art 22 of Directive 2006/123 requires that your country passed laws to ensure that you make available “the name of the provider, his legal status and form, the geographic address at which he is established and details enabling him to be contacted rapidly and communicated with directly and, as the case may be, by electronic means”. I think you would be in scope of this directive since you're acting commercially. This legally mandated self-doxxing is unfortunate for private bloggers, but it's also essential for making it possible to enforce data subject rights: if you were to violate someone's privacy rights, how could they sue you if they don't know where to serve you with a lawsuit? However, all things are a balancing act. These requirements are not intended to limit freedom of expression. If you're just trying to communicate something to the public without jeopardizing your anonymity, then paradoxically social media services can be more attractive.