Third-Party Trademark Policy

This page collects The Grid’s policies around the use of third party trademarks. If you are looking for The Grid’s trademark policy and brand usage guidelines, please see our Brand Usage Guidelines.

Third-party trademarks displayed on this website or in The Grid data are used with permission where necessary, or as part of our Trademark Fair Use Policy, and are the property of their respective owners. Please contact the respective owner(s) with questions about using these marks.

No Sponsorship or Endorsement

No Sponsorship or Endorsement of The Grid by the presence of a profile. Having a profile in The Grid’s data is not sponsorship or endorsement by the project or company behind the profile of The Grid or the data we have on them. This applies even if it is a claimed profile.

No Sponsorship or Endorsement by The Grid. The Grid does not endorse or sponsor any commercial product, services, or activity of the projects in The Grid’s data. Having a profile, or having claimed profile in The Grid’s data, does not mean that The Grid has sponsored or endorsed them.

Trademark Fair Use Policy

What is fair use?

Trademarks function to enable the public to recognise the particular source of goods or services. A trademark owner can stop others from using its trademark to prevent confusion around the source of the goods or services. Essentially trademarks act as a consumer protection function so that people can identify the source of goods and services and not be confused as to who is providing them.

In some circumstances someone may use a trademark if the use is considered a “fair use.” This “fair use” exception is recognised throughout most of the world.

What are the types of fair use?

In general, there are two types of fair use in trademarks:

1. descriptive fair use; and

2. nominative fair use.

Descriptive fair use permits use of another’s trademark to describe the user’s products or services, rather than as a trademark to indicate the source of the goods or services. This usually is appropriate when part of a trademark is descriptive, generally meaning it describes what the product does. For example, you might have the word “BLOCKCHAIN” as part of a registered trademark, but that doesn’t mean no one else can use the word “Blockchain” as it is descriptive for distributed ledger technology.

Nominative fair use permits use of another’s trademark to refer to the trademark owner’s goods and services associated with the mark. In another words, someone wants to refer to the company or their goods and services by name, and the trademark is the easiest and simplest way to do this without causing confusion that this person is actually supplying or associated with the trademark holder and their goods and services. There are some factors to consider in nominative fair use, such: (a) as how identifiable the company or their goods or services that you are discussing are without use of the trademark; (b) only using what’s reasonably necessary; and (c) making sure you avoid the impression of sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark owner.

Trademark Fair Use by The Grid

Some of the trademarks on sites by The Grid, or in our data services, are used on the basis of Trademark Fair Use, which depending on the trademark and the context, may be either descriptive fair use or nominative fair use.

If you are a trademark owner, and you disagree with the use of your trademark on The Grid:

1. If it relates to your own profile on The Grid, and you have not yet claimed your profile, you can claim your profile and suggest updates as appropriate.

2. If it relates to someone else’s use of your trademark on their profile on The Grid, please follow the instructions at Trademark Notices below.

3. If it relates to The Grid’s use of your trademark on our websites (not in our dataset), then please also follow the instructions at Trademark Notices below.

Trademark Notices:

If you are a trademark owner, or agent of the owner, and believe that content available by means of one or more of our websites or services infringes one or more of your trademarks, please send us a notice containing the information requested for a Copyright Notice, as described in Reporting Copyright Violations. We will handle these notices similarly to the process described for copyright violations and may disclose the notice to the customer or user who uploaded the content you say is infringing.

The processes described above do not limit our ability to pursue any other remedies we may have to address suspected infringement.