Comment by phkahler 7 hours ago
Seems like a lot of trademark infringement suits about to come their way. Am I mistaken or is there no way this viable? In addition, nobody has any legal right to put others trademarks (use these) on anything without the trademark owners permission. So even if the site and distribution is somehow OK, nobody can really use them anyway. Right?
I'm not sure if simply offering a brand's logo would be trademark infringement.
Years ago someone contacted me at the company I worked for claiming in some sorta pseudo legal language that we couldn't have one of our competitor's logos on our website. We had it on a promotional page comparing features across similar products.
Turns out we can do that in the US.
These and others have been online for a while, so I doubt it. There's more here, under the Brands / Social category: https://icones.js.org/
Yes, there are ways someone could use them that would not only run afoul of the trademark, but have trademark holders come after them. However, that doesn't make this useless, because there are proper and gray-area uses of these as well.
It's not trademark infringement to copy or display a logo. Trademark infringement happens when you confuse customers by using a logo or phrase and make them think that you're selling the actual product or that you're somehow endorsed by the original company.
Font Awesome been available since 2013 at least, featuring brand icons https://web.archive.org/web/20130608045113/http://fontawesom...
Seems fine
I imagine avoiding IP legal issues with things like icons could be less about signing agreements with all involved companies and more about having a team that can respond professionally to an inquiry.
Businesses may often not really understand what’s going on and default to being worried about third-party use of their trademarks that they normally must defend. Perhaps they don’t need to worry in this case, where it may actually provide a bit of free advertisement, but if there’s no one on the other side then it wouldn’t help the case.
IANAL
They probably each carry their own licensing and terms of use. I'd suspect there's a good number where reuse in some situations would be permitted, and in others would not. But every single one is going to be different, and just making assumptions is a quick way to blindly assume enormous legal liability.
Isn't it also copyright infringement, and thus punishable by death in some enlightened jurisdictions [1], or at least by thousands in damages per infringement?
How many infringements do you generate by just loading the front page?
[1] Those most exposed to Hollywood lobbying.
I assume most brands are happy to see their icons being used/shared on as many platforms as possible. It's just free advertisment.
If someone uses them in a context that's actually problematic for the brand, the brand can still sue them then. But that won't be the common case.
You can usually use the assets which are available on the official website, example for meta it is https://about.meta.com/brand/resources/facebook/logo/.
If you see the official logo it has different colors than the one provided in the website, so you can't that for production use cases.
Supplying the assets is not a problem. Most stock art orgs have brands. I suspect that they can get into "gray areas," if they charge for it.
Using them is the problematic part.
You're mostly fine unless you are confusing consumers. The purpose of these marks is exactly to avoid that, so you're going to get into a lot of trouble if you use the marks to mislead people in any way.
Take the Air China logo - if a not-so-bright reader might think you are Air China, you're using this all wrong. But if you use an Air China logo to signify the routes actually flown by Air China on a free world map of international flights on your web site, well, yeah, that's Air China, nobody is misled, even a moron knows the little logos on your map of the world aren't actually jet aeroplanes.