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[fb]

If a licensee is going to build the product himself one at a time, and market it online, does it make sense to have the product labelled "clone" in some fashion? Sort of like a label that would say "IBM Clone".

[artchain]

My first thought would be to consult your license terms; they often spell out how the licensed products may be branded and promoted.

[fb]

We are the licensors, so I'm trying to figure out the best way to spell it out. With regular manufacturers it's more straight forward, but with individual DIY home-built units, from possibly hundreds of builders, there probably is going to be a lot of variability in quality. So differentiating theirs from ours seems desireable.

[artchain]

Ah, I see.  That's a different issue.  In fact, not so much a legal issue as a business and marketing decision.

If your brand has value, I'd be very careful about potential damage to your brand by allowing "a lot of variability in quality."  You should have strict terms to control the quality of the licensed goods.

And you may not want your trademark used to identify these licensed products at all.

For example, back when Apple allowed other hardware companies to manufacture "Macintosh" computers, the terms were very specific.  "Macintosh" could NOT be used to identify the computers.  They were called by their own brand names, and were allowed to say something like "Macintosh compatible, manufactured under license from Apple Computer." 

 

[fb]

That's probably exactly what we need. It would still promote the brand, while separating us from the individual builders. We could have them include in their advertising something like "Built by John Doe under license from IBM"