They’re a bit more complicated. First, you can easily use another company's trademark on your own product when using it for means of comparision. You see those Coke and Pepsi commercials, or McDonalds and Burger King commercials all the time making use of the other's trademark for purposes of product comparision.

In the above mentioned cases, they are using the other company's trademark to suggest that in comparison that their product is better. There is also another means to use another product for comparison; that being to use it for the purpose of identifying a product type. That would be the case for some of the Axis & Allies variants out there. In the case of our Empires of History game series, we list "Axis & Allies Variant" on the covers to let the consumers know, that by comparision, they will find our games simular in nature, by saying it is a variation on the theme presented in A&A.

What you can't do is use another company's trademark as a title for your own publication. There must be no chance that an average consumer could mistake your product for that of the trademark owner. This also touches on the topic of "trade dress" (see below). Titling your product the same as theirs means you are directly profiteering off their tradmark's market value.

Utilizing a trademark by comparison is perfectly legal, just so long as you properly acknowlwedge who the owner of the trademark is and that they have or have not given their permission for such use.

Trade Dress

Now, "Trade Dress" is not 100% percent connected with Trademark law, but largely is. A trademark need not be just a word or title. A trademark can also be an image, a saying, a unique shape, or anything else highly original that is used to establish consumer awareness of a product. If you produce a product that is simular in feel and look to another company's product and utilize their trademark in the title, or otherwise make it look like your product is their product or associated with them, then you have set yourself up for trouble.

When publishing our Empires of History Line, we do not use A&A in the title. We do not use it in the name of the series. As a notation (though a fairly large one) we do print that they are Axis & Allies variants. This lets consumers know that our product is a variant of a sort on the original A&A game. Let’s them know that by comparison that are game is simular in play to theirs, much like many collectable card games are simular in feel to each other. Our products are *not* packaged like A&A, so they do not remotely come close to violating trade dress. And lastly, each of our games contains a complete set of rules, independantly designed and written from that of A&A, so that there can be no claim that our games are a "deriviaive" work.

A derivative work is something that *requires* the use of another's product to be of any use. That is the clause which ultimately caused WOTC the problems it had with Palladium. They had published a conversion for their RPG to Rifts (or was it original Palladium Fantasy?). In either case, that section of WOTC Primal Order product was only useful if a consumer was interested in converting Primal Order characters into Rifts characters or vice versa, and was hence a derivative work, trying to draw appeal off the Rifts trademark.

Disclaimer

I am not a lawyer, though we most certainly have consulted one on this issue. It would be business suicide to do otherwise while publishing anything that used another company's trademark -anywhere------.