There is a lot of confusion about this issue, quite often engendered by trade mark owners themselves for obvious reasons. As a photographer and artist I take the matter very seriously and am the first to act if my copyright is infringed (actually I am not: I retain an agency to do that image tracking and lawyering). So that’s my perspective. The Vulcan to the Sky Trust (which has benefited from my gift-aided donations, incidentally, just to declare my interest) are entitled to protect their intellectual property too, and quite rightly so. That’s the starting point. Now –
Copyright and trade mark are two different things. I cannot build a Vulcan (I wish!) and fly it around in public with “XH558” written on it: that would be a flagrant violation of their trademark. Only Apple can put an Apple logo on a laptop. If I take a photo of a Vulcan with XH558 written on it flying around in public, I own the copyright in the photo. I can sell it or do whatever I like with it. I can even advertise it as a photo of XH558 because that is a factual, descriptive use of their trademark. – provided I do not misrepresent that I am associated with the trade mark owners, that somehow they benefit from my sale of the photo. I stand to be corrected but that, as I currently understand it, is the position in summary. Really it’s just common sense. The International Trade Mark Association has a good round-up: point (6) onwards gets to the meat of it –
http://www.inta.org/TrademarkBasics/FactSheets/Pages/OnlineAdvertisingandUseofOthersMarksFactSheet.aspx
Obviously, if the Trust do not want people photographing XH558 on their Vulcan they could remove the label or just stop flying it around in public. Oh….
GE
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