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I have published a FOSS project on Github and am interested in retaining the trademarks to the project name and graphic elements.

From the Apache 2.0 license:

  1. Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.

Is there a standard way to declare trademarks, copyrights etc. in code repositories? For example, do project owners typically have a "COPYRIGHT.md" file? Or is there typically a "Trademarks" section of the "README.md"? (I've never seen this before.) Are there any templates/good examples/best practices for how to do this?

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  • Which elements of your project do you believe meet the threshold to count as a trademark? Aug 10, 2022 at 17:12
  • @PhilipKendall In this case the name and logo
    – Brian Risk
    Aug 10, 2022 at 18:21
  • You could look into how this is done by Mozilla for the Firefox browser. Aug 11, 2022 at 12:50

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There is no consistent practice around this. A few projects put a TRADEMARK.md file in their main repositories. More put a few lines in their README files. The most common practice, though, is to put the trademark information on your project website.

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