Trademark Policy

This policy sets out how [REGISTERED COMPANY NAME] permits the use of its trademarks, logos, product names and other brand features. It applies to everyone: customers, partners, developers, journalists, educators and the general public.

Trademark law exists to stop people being confused about who made something. That is the test we apply throughout. If a reasonable person seeing your use would think that SorviAI made your product, endorsed it, or is connected to your business when we are not, the use is not permitted, whether or not it appears in the lists below.

This policy governs our brand only. It does not grant you any rights in our software, which is licensed separately under our Terms of Service, and it does not affect your rights under our Privacy Policy.

The following are trademarks of [REGISTERED COMPANY NAME].

Registered marks are shown with the ® symbol and unregistered marks with ™ where we use them. We only mark something ® in a territory where it is actually registered; where an application is pending we say so, because an unregistered mark is still protected by law. Marks not listed here may also be protected, and this list will change as our brand develops.

Several of the application names above are ordinary words. We claim them as they are used within the platform and alongside our house brand, not as a claim on the English language: nobody needs our permission to describe their own stock as inventory or their own workshop as repairs.

If you remember nothing else, remember these four. Everything in the sections that follow comes out of them.

• Do not cause confusion. Never use our marks in a way that suggests your product, service or business is ours, comes from us, or is endorsed by us.
• Be accurate. Only make claims about SorviAI that are true at the time you make them, including claims about compatibility, integration or partnership.
• Keep our marks distinct from yours. Our name should read as a reference to us, not as part of your own brand.
• Do not alter our marks. Use them as we supply them, or do not use them at all.

Everything in the sections that follow assumes the conditions below are already met. They are prerequisites, not suggestions. If one of them is not satisfied, the use is not permitted, even where it otherwise appears on a permitted list.

• Accuracy. Every claim of compatibility, integration, use or relationship must be true at the moment you publish it. If it stops being true, you must remove or correct it within [CURE PERIOD] days of it ceasing to be true.
• Prominence. Your own name or logo must appear first, and be at least as large and as visually dominant as ours. Ours must read as a reference to us, never as the source of what you are offering.
• Current files. Where a logo is involved, you must have downloaded the current asset from [BRAND ASSETS URL] and must use it unaltered. Older files you already hold stop qualifying once we publish a replacement.
• A signed agreement. Partner, reseller, certified, authorised, accredited and similar titles require a signed agreement with us that grants the exact title you are using, and they lapse when that agreement ends.
• Written permission, where this policy requires it. Permission is specific to the use described in your request, non-exclusive, non-transferable and revocable. It does not extend to a later use, a different medium, or another entity in your group.
• No outstanding breach. The permissions in this policy are suspended for as long as a breach of our Terms of Service or our Abuse and Acceptable Use Policy is unresolved.
• No conflicting application. You must not have applied for, or hold, a trademark, company name or domain that is identical or confusingly similar to our marks in any territory.
• Lawful where published. Trademark, advertising and consumer protection rules differ by country, and meeting this policy does not exempt you from them.

Two of these deserve emphasis, because they are where most well-intentioned uses go wrong. The first is that a claim which was true when it was written does not stay true on its own: an integration you have retired, or a partnership that has ended, must come off your site. The second is that permission for one thing is not permission for the next thing, however similar it looks to you.

Stating the conditions once, ahead of the permissions, is what lets the lists that follow stay short and readable. It also removes the argument that a use was allowed because a particular list did not happen to repeat a condition. Everything after this section is granted subject to it.

Trademark law allows you to refer to a product by its name. This is descriptive use: you do not need a licence, and you do not need to ask.

• Refer to us accurately in text. Write about SorviAI in an article, review, comparison, blog post, book, course or forum. You can be critical. Honest criticism is not trademark infringement.
• Say that you use us. “We run our accounts on SorviAI” on your website or in a job advert is fine.
• Say that your product works with ours. Phrases such as “works with SorviAI”, “compatible with SorviAI” or “integrates with SorviAI” are fine, so long as it is true and your own name is the prominent one.
• Describe a service you offer. “Bookkeeping services for SorviAI users” or “SorviAI training” is fine, provided it is clear that you are an independent business.
• Use our name in a comparison. Comparative advertising is permitted where the comparison is fair, accurate and not misleading.

In every permitted case, use our name in plain text at the same size and weight as the words around it. Do not use our logo, and do not make our name the largest thing on the page.

None of the following is permitted, with or without attribution, and none of it becomes permitted by adding a disclaimer.

• Use our name or logo as part of your own company, product or application name.
• Register a domain name containing “sorvi”, or a confusingly similar spelling of it.
• Use our logo as your application icon, favicon, avatar or social media profile picture.
• Alter our logo: recolour, distort, rotate, crop, add effects, or redraw it.
• Combine our logo with your own, or place it inside another shape or lockup.
• Claim to be an official, certified, authorised or approved partner without a written agreement.
• Use our marks on merchandise for sale.
• Use our marks in a way that disparages us, or in connection with unlawful, deceptive or offensive material.
• Apply to register our marks, or anything confusingly similar, anywhere in the world.
• Bid on our marks as paid search keywords in a way that misleads people into thinking your result is ours.
• Use our marks in a way that suggests we endorse your product, service, cause or opinion.

Our logo is a figurative mark. Where we have granted you permission to use it, download the current file from [BRAND ASSETS URL] and use it exactly as supplied. That page is the only source: a copy taken from our website, a screenshot or a press article is not the supplied file.

Rules that always apply.

• Use the supplied file. Do not redraw, trace, screenshot or recreate it.
• Do not change the colours, and do not invert it yourself. Where you need a variant we have not published, ask us rather than making one.
• Do not distort it. No stretching, squashing, rotating, skewing, outlining, shadows, glows or animation.
• Leave clear space around it, on every side, of at least the height of the mark itself.
• Do not display it smaller than [MINIMUM SIZE] pixels high, which is where it stops being legible.
• Give it a background with enough contrast, and never place it on a busy image or pattern.
• Keep it visually smaller and less prominent than your own logo.
• Never use it as a link to anything other than our own website.

These rules are specific for a reason. A logo only works as an indicator of origin if it always looks the same. Every recoloured and stretched copy weakens the mark, and a mark that has been widely used in inconsistent forms is materially harder to enforce when somebody genuinely abuses it.

These are the uses that cause real damage, because they attach our brand to something we do not control.

• Company and product names. Do not incorporate our marks, or anything confusingly similar, into the name of your business, product, service, application or open source project.
• Domain names. Do not register domains containing our marks, common misspellings of them, or our marks combined with generic words such as “app”, “cloud”, “support”, “login” or “pro”. Domains that mimic our sign-in pages are treated as phishing and reported as such.
• Social media. Do not use our marks as your account name or handle in a way that suggests the account is ours, or is officially connected to us. A user group or community account should make its independence obvious in both the name and the biography.
• App stores and package registries. Do not publish under a name that starts with our mark, and do not use our logo as your listing icon.

If you are a customer

Your subscription lets you use the platform. It does not transfer any rights in our brand. You may say that your business runs on SorviAI, and you may use our name freely in your internal documents and training materials.

Where your workspace is served on a web address that includes our domain, that address is provided as part of the service. It may change or be withdrawn if your subscription ends, and it gives you no rights in our marks.

If you publish a storefront on our platform

A storefront you publish carries your brand, not ours. Your name, your logo and your products are the prominent things on it, and nothing in this policy asks you to add ours.

Storefronts currently carry a plain text “Powered by Sorvi” credit in the footer, which the platform adds for you. You do not need to do anything to comply with this policy, and you should not replace that credit with our logo, enlarge it, or restyle it to look like an endorsement of your products.

If you are a reseller or partner

Titles such as partner, reseller, certified, authorised or accredited may only be used if we have signed an agreement with you that grants them, and only in the exact form that agreement specifies. Those rights end when the agreement ends, and you must stop using them promptly.

If you build something that connects to SorviAI, name it after yourself and describe the connection in words.

• Your product name must be distinctly yours. “Ledgerly for SorviAI” works. “SorviAI Ledgerly” does not.
• Do not use our logo as your icon, in your listing artwork, or in any way that dominates your own branding.
• Do not imply that we built, reviewed, tested or endorsed your integration.
• Describe compatibility accurately, and update your claims when they stop being true.
• Use our marks freely in your technical documentation to describe endpoints, fields and behaviour. That is ordinary descriptive use and needs no permission.

We want people to be able to write about SorviAI and to teach it.

• Screenshots. You may use unaltered screenshots of the product in articles, reviews, tutorials, books and course materials without asking. Do not edit a screenshot to change what the product appears to do, and blank out any personal or customer data before you publish it.
• Journalists. You may use our name and logo to illustrate a story about us. Logo files are at [BRAND ASSETS URL].
• Educators and trainers. You may use our name to describe what you teach. Do not present your course as official or certified unless we have agreed to that in writing.
• Conferences and events. Do not use our name in an event title in a way that suggests we are the host or the sponsor. “SorviAI User Conference” implies that we run it. “An independent conference for SorviAI users” does not.

When you use our marks in a document, page or presentation, include a short attribution once, usually in the footer or the credits. Use this wording:

Sorvi and SorviAI are trademarks of [REGISTERED COMPANY NAME]. Used with permission. This product is not affiliated with or endorsed by [REGISTERED COMPANY NAME].

Drop the second sentence if you are an agreed partner and your agreement says otherwise. In running text, use our marks as adjectives rather than as nouns or verbs where it reads naturally: “the SorviAI platform” rather than “a SorviAI”. Do not pluralise our marks or make them possessive, and keep the capitalisation as shown.

If what you want to do is not clearly permitted above, ask. We are not looking for reasons to say no, and most requests are straightforward.

Email [TRADEMARK CONTACT EMAIL] with who you are, exactly how you want to use the mark, where it will appear, and a mock-up or a link if you have one. We aim to reply within [RESPONSE DAYS] working days.

Any permission we give is non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited to what we agreed, and revocable. If we ask you to stop, or to change something, please do so promptly.

If you find somebody using our name or our logo in a way that misleads people, especially a site imitating our sign-in page, please tell us at [TRADEMARK CONTACT EMAIL]. Include a link and a screenshot.

Reports of phishing and impersonation are treated as urgent, because our customers keep financial and employee records in the platform and a convincing fake sign-in page puts those at risk. If what you are reporting is abuse of the platform itself rather than of our brand, the Abuse and Acceptable Use Policy has the right address for it.

We may update this policy as our brand develops. The version and effective date at the top tell you which one you are reading, and previous versions remain available at [ARCHIVE URL]. Continuing to use our marks after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Nothing in this policy waives any right we have. Not enforcing a provision on one occasion does not stop us enforcing it later.

For permission requests, misuse reports, or any question about this policy, use the details below.

Four words this policy uses in their legal sense rather than their everyday one.