Proper trademark usage in news articles

[kalniel]

While reading the Hexus article about AMD's Gaming Evolved I noticed that Hexus mentioned a hell of a lot of trademarked names - while I'm sure dumb users like myself can get away with it in forum posts like this one, official news articles from a professional body probably ought to be attributing correctly. For example:

The following usage guidelines must be followed for any use of the Marks below:

* “TM” must be used as shown with the first use of the written Mark in a document
* the following text must be included in each document that uses the Marks:
“OpenCL and the OpenCL logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos.”

[mikerr]

"Written documents..."

seen any webpages doing the above? BBC News doesn't
(or I haven't notced, maybe a generic disclaimer is somewhere)

[Steve]

As far as I'm aware the rules are somewhat different for journalism vs. a competing company, or other entities in the industry (resellers and so on).

For example, the Reuters style guide stipulates that:

A trademark is a brand, symbol or word registered by a manufacturer and protected by law to prevent others from using it. Use a generic equivalent unless the trademark is important to the story. When used, follow the owner’s capitalisation, e.g. Aspro not aspro but aspirin.

Note how it doesn't require the trademark system or any other declarations.

Some publications adopt a very purist approach and refer to all brands and companies capitalised as you would expect a proper noun to be.

I'm not a journo here really, but I know that we tend to follow the owner's captialisation.

In any case no, there is no precedent that requires us to display the marks.

[kalniel]

Cool