Legal advice

Kennh

I am currently building an app for android. This app will use the names of Irish banks and be displaying them. My question is, do I have to ask permission to use the names of these banks? Also if I do, how do I go about doing that? I have no idea about this area of things! Thanks

mneylon

What are you doing with the names / banks?

Financial services are very strictly regulated so you need to be careful

FYI - avoid using their logos unless you get permission

Kennh

I am storing the locations of their A.T.M.'s and just have to reference "This is a BOI A.T.M." for example. So the only thing I am referencing is the name of the bank. I don't think there would be any infringement here, but I am using the name of a company so I don't know if I do need their permission to use it?
I will avoid using logos thanks for that!

mneylon

Kennh wrote: »

I am storing the locations of their A.T.M.'s and just have to reference "This is a BOI A.T.M." for example. So the only thing I am referencing is the name of the bank. I don't think there would be any infringement here, but I am using the name of a company so I don't know if I do need their permission to use it?
I will avoid using logos thanks for that!

So it's like a map or something?
I can't see how they'd have an issue with that.

dalta5billion

Using the Bank's logo might be copyright infringement, but using their name is most certainly not.

I hope you are plotting the ATM locations yourself - otherwise you would have to get permission to use someone else's data.

Kennh

I sent an email to the banks outlining the content in the app so I will wait for a response from them to be sure of the matter. Thank you for your input!

dalta5billion - I have plotted the locations all myself, at a cost of a great amount of petrol! Every bit of data is all original.

Evil Phil

Details on all banks operational in Ireland, including their name obviously, are published by the Central Bank of Ireland and can be found here: http://registers.centralbank.ie/DownloadsPage.aspx. It is published under the Public Sector Information Licence, as detailed by the Central Bank here.

That should cover any legal issues around using bank names for you. Where are you going to get the ATM location data from? I don't know of an open data source for this, but it's been a while since I looked. If you know of one (open data that is) please share. If it's proprietary I guess you can't but I'm still curious.

Right, just saw the bit about using a lot of petrol. You know, that dataset has commercial value outside of your app.

Kennh

Thanks you for that link that's brilliant information!

I am collecting the data for the app myself. Although a dataset does already exist of ATM locations, it does not contain all the information that I need for my app, and it is not open source so I can't use that. Instead I am labouring away locating ATMs manually.

I don't think the collection of ATMs I have at the moment would be of any commercial value. However, in the near future enough I will have quite a large dataset. Who were you thinking would have interest in this sort of dataset?