Trademark is different from copyright in that you can have a trademarked logo on your webpage (or in any other work) as long as you aren’t implying association with the owner of the mark. Trademark owners can’t come after you for, say, writing a scathing critique of their product that includes their logo for reference. But they can come after you if you add their logo to a list of “companies using this library!” without their permission.
There are tons of questions I admittedly have about why reality shows blur out logos (I imagine they’re avoiding creating the impression that a brand has endorsed the crazy stuff happening on the show through product placement) and why developers can include the github logo in reference to the github repo for a project when neither the author nor the project are associated with the github brand (my guess is that there’s a carve-out for that sort of thing, since github wants people to do this as much as possible).
I believe you're absolutely right in general, but it also helps that GitHub has explicitly allowed their logo's usage for that scenario for a while: https://github.com/logos
> There are tons of questions I admittedly have about why reality shows blur out logos (I imagine they’re avoiding creating the impression that a brand has endorsed the crazy stuff happening on the show through product placement)
Yeah. I've been watching a certain popular and somewhat NSFW Canadian mockumentary series, and they're very consistent and conspicuous about blurring out logos on seemingly random things. There could be crazy things happening on the screen, and suddenly you notice a random bag of chips being almost completely blurred. I've been wondering whether they did that to avoid lawsuits, as an artistic decision, or both.
My favorite is when they use Fiji water in TV shows - they peel off the labels but there's no freaking other water company in the world that uses the iconic shape.
And it's really weird that they use Fiji so much without attribution - it's used so often that you'd think they paid to be in the show but clearly the peeled off the label. Did they pay enough to have the iconic bottle but not enough to see the word Fiji?
Of note: you can trademark things other than logos as long as they are non-functional parts of the product (i.e. a bike maker couldn't trademark the shape of their gears to screw competitors). So it's totally possible that Fiji might have a trademark on that bottle shape. It would certainly make sense, since that shape is so iconic and so associated with them that if someone else were to put their water in bottles with that shape, it could possibly be mistaken by consumers for Fiji Water.
Aside: You don't need to inform people you're not a lawyer. But, if you were, you would need to tell them "I am not your lawyer" unless, in fact, you were.
My favourite blurb along those lines, from a forum, "I am a lawyer. But I'm not your lawyer. And, like contraceptives: someone else's lawyer won't protect you."
Trademark is different from copyright in that you can have a trademarked logo on your webpage (or in any other work) as long as you aren’t implying association with the owner of the mark. Trademark owners can’t come after you for, say, writing a scathing critique of their product that includes their logo for reference. But they can come after you if you add their logo to a list of “companies using this library!” without their permission.
There are tons of questions I admittedly have about why reality shows blur out logos (I imagine they’re avoiding creating the impression that a brand has endorsed the crazy stuff happening on the show through product placement) and why developers can include the github logo in reference to the github repo for a project when neither the author nor the project are associated with the github brand (my guess is that there’s a carve-out for that sort of thing, since github wants people to do this as much as possible).