Other companies logos

Am I allowed to list companys on my website and compare them to my prices?  And can I display their logos?

Plus, I'm in the UK, but the site is hosted in the US, does this make any difference?

Thanks,

Tom

Ok, I will just stick to the names then, thanks 

Actually, you can use trademarks under the Fair Use clause (referring to US law -- not sure on other countries). You can use the logos so long as the "mark" would not confuse consumers about the source of the product. As a matter of fact, US law encourages this use by competitors for comparisons especially under the Lanham Act.

Note: Some state laws may vary slightly or offer other protections for trademarks. However, the nature of the Internet itself makes this issue difficult. Generally, Federal law in the US should serve as the guideline.

References:

Using Another's Trademark
http://www.publaw.com/fairusetrade.html

=============
 The Lanham Act permits a non-owner of a registered trademark to make "fair use" or "nominative use" of a trademark under certain circumstances without obtaining permission from the mark's owner. The fair use and nominative use defenses are to help ensure that trademark owners do not prohibit the use of their marks when they are used for the purpose of description or identification. Fair use or nominative use may be recognized in those instances where a reader of a given work is clearly able to understand that the use of the trademark does not suggest sponsorship or association with the trademark owner's product or services and therefore is not being used in a manner to confuse the reader.
==============


Fair use and trademark law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Fair_use_and_trademark_law

============
A recent court case, Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, provides and develops the relationship between thumbnails, inline linking and fair use. In the lower District Court case on a motion for summary judgment Arriba Soft was found to have violated copyright without a fair use defense in the use of thumbnail pictures and inline linking from Kelly's website in Arriba's image search engine. That decision was appealed and contested by Internet rights activists such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who argued that it is clearly covered under fair use. On appeal, the 9th District Court of Appeals found that the thumbnails were fair use and remanded the case to the lower court for trial after issuing a revised opinion on July 7, 2003. The remaining issues were resolved with a default judgement after Arriba Soft had experienced significant financial problems and failed to reach a negotiated settlement.
============


NOMINATIVE USE AS FAIR USE
http://www.cll.com/articles/article.cfm?articleid=32

============
The WCVB-TV case serves as a perfect segue into the next fair use defense, nominative fair use. Unlike most statutory fair use case, nominative fair use involves the descriptive use of another's mark to describe or identify the plaintiff's goods or services, not the defendants.

In 1992, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit articulated this new defense to trademark infringement. In New Kids on the Block v. News America Publishing, Inc., 971 F.2d 302 (9th Cir. 1992), the Ninth Circuit, in a typically articulate opinion by Judge Kozinski, described those circumstances in which the use of another's trademark is allowed, even when not directly covered by the statutory fair use defense of the Lanham Act:

[W]here the defendant uses a trademark to describe the plaintiff's product, rather than its own, we hold that a commercial user is entitled to a nominative fair use defense provided he meets the following three requirements: First, the product or service in question must be one not readily identifiable without use of the trademark; second, only so much of the mark or marks may be used as is reasonably necessary to identify the product or service; and third, the use must do nothing that would, in conjunction with the mark, suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark holder.

================

xeerex wrote: Actually, you can use trademarks under the Fair Use clause *snip*

Ooops. My bad. xeerex's post refers to what you want. Mr. Beer posted on use of logos for promotional materials that are not factual statements about competitive products. Mr. Beer has been bad lately...