Comment by stymaar
4 hours ago
That's the licensing agreement between the owner and the trademarks, and their customers for the use of the trademark.
But the American Halal Foundation could revise their definition of what counts as Halal, and then license the brand to a company that doesn't meet the current criteria, without asking for permission from anyone.
It's in your wording already: “the customer that the organization's standards have been followed precisely” (emphasis mine), nothing prevents the organization from changing their standards (well, maybe the licensing agreement with their customer brands does, but that's purely a contract thing and has nothing to to with the trademark per se).
Trademark is the mechanism of enforcement for this usage, just as copyright is the mechanism of enforcement for the GPL.
You can come up with other mechanisms that would work, but this is the one that we have in existence now.
Sure. But the same way it would be disingenuous to say that copyright exists so that we can have copyleft, it's a fallacy to say that trademark exist to protect the consumer, which is the point I'm arguing against:
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.