[WikiEN-l] Fighting over (R) and (tm) symbols

[Carl Peterson]

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.

I went back and looked at the history to see what you were talking about
(current version doesn't have them). My main comment is that the trademark
symbols should have been inserted correctly, using the actual (r) symbol
instead of the (R), which is just distracting. The trademark (tm) should
have appeared without parenthesis and in superscript and all caps.

Carl
On 8/30/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:

> 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/
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>
>
>
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