
Ask HN: How illegal does the code have to be before you refuse to deploy? - throwuway
Context: I work in the US.<p>During code review, I noticed that we were putting a registered trademark symbol after our product name, and I didn&#x27;t know if our company had gone through the appropriate approval process yet, and so should be using the unregistered trademark symbol. This seems to me pretty benign, plus IANAL, so I just made a note in code review that we should look into that, and moved on.<p>The company has legal counsel. I feel it&#x27;d be inappropriate for me to do more than make a note, and that management &amp; legal are taking care of the business.<p>But there is line where I&#x27;d refuse to deploy code, for either ethical or legal reasons (nobody wants to be that Volkswagen engineer). Anybody have some thoughts or good resources?
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smt88
I'm not giving you legal advice, but you can quickly learn from Google that TM
symbols don't require filing anything.

I've never heard of 'illegal' code coming back to haunt a developer except in
the VW example, and they were instructed to break the law with no ambiguity.

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throwuway
We weren't using TM, that was what I noticed. We were using the registered
trademark symbol ®.

