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Kaufman445

: Trademark ® Symbol Required in Product Description? When I am talking about third party trademarks on my website: Am I supposed to use the appropriate registered ® symbols or is this not

@Kaufman445

Posted in: #Legal

When I am talking about third party trademarks on my website:

Am I supposed to use the appropriate registered ® symbols or is this not required?

I am not talking about our own trademarks but trademarks of products we sell on our website.

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@Jessie594

You should always use it, but it brings up a paradox: As of now Google shopping (or perhaps other feeds) do not allow things like the TM symbol and/or the restricted symbol. You will encounter "trademark violation error(s)" and the feed may not parse those items. This could change at any time (or maybe it already has).

Perhaps you could get away with truncating them as long as you had a proper asset/branding disclaimer saying something like "Due to partner ecosystems we are not allowed to display certain symbols. All identifiable brand, trade, or restricted words are property of their owners." You would have to eloquently craft this though to weave through all the legals...and it prob wouldnt protect much since the disclaimer would not be present in 3rd party areas like SERPs.

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@BetL925

It probably is, from a purely legal standpoint actually required. Our company was actually sued about it several years ago. We were selling Brand's products on our website and selling them as Brand Product. The problem arose when we started ranking higher for Brand Product than the actual Brand's website. This caused Brand to get grumpy, and brought us to court, even though we were buying the product from them 100% legitimately. When all was said and done and the lawyers got their pound of flesh, we were required to put ® next to any use of their trademark.

That said, no reasonable company would give you a hard time about this as long as you're not abusing or doing anything damaging with their trademarked term.

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@Ravi8258870

I would personally say that you will not require a trademark/copyright symbol
I associate ® as a registered product/service but you will not require it as it has no legal relevance.

Copyright policy is down to the company which you are selling the product for and as long as you are not claiming it to be your own product you will be fine and doing no harm.

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