It is my impression (IANAL) that such usages are not necessary, nor are they standard in English-language writing style, when the usage is of a journalistic or encyclopedic nature rather than as part of marketing materials. After all, Wikipedia has many articles, like [[Coca-Cola]], that are named after trademarks, but don't display the symbols demanded by the lawyers.

There seems to be ongoing fighting over at the [[Certified Financial Planner]] page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certified_Financial_Planner over whether the page should be festooned with (r) and (tm) symbols everywhere the trademarked title of the article occurs, including as part of the article's title itself. It is my impression (IANAL) that such usages are not necessary, nor are they standard in English-language writing style, when the usage is of a journalistic or encyclopedic nature rather than as part of marketing materials. After all, Wikipedia has many articles, like [[Coca-Cola]], that are named after trademarks, but don't display the symbols demanded by the lawyers. At any rate, if such symbols do remain in the article, they ought to be done with proper Unicode characters (technically feasible now that the site is entirely in UTF-8) rather than their ugly ASCII imitations. -- Dan Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

On 8/30/06, Matt Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, it's up to the person who owns the trademark to spray them around everywhere. If we do it, we're just being chumps.

On 31/08/06, Stephen Streater <sbstreater(a)mac.com> wrote: Business: "We demand you cover your article in (R) and (tm)." Wikipedia: "No. Bloody obvious academic fair use, any legal threat would be obviously frivolous and probably sanctionable." Business: "Well, we tried."

On 31 Aug 2006, at 10:19, David Gerard wrote: I think trying may be enough in English law. Usually a big document will just say "All trademarks acknowledged" once. Perhaps Wikipedia could say that on a page somewhere.

David Gerard wrote: We have also traditionally had good success with simply noting, upon first use, the the term is a trademark held by so-and-so. This is a nice compromise because (a) it is encyclopedic information and (b) it usually satisfies them. When they want us to sprinkle (R) or (TM) everywhere, yeah, well, they can just forget it, that's stupid.

The trademark (tm) should have appeared without parenthesis and in superscript and all caps.

I thought that a basic rule of thumb was to use a trademark (r, tm, or p) symbol at the first usage of that word. However, in my experience, it is usually accompanied by a footnote specifying the owner of said trademarks, and, as you have stated, is not typically utilized in encyclopedic materials.