A licensing agreement, or license, is a written contractual agreement between the owner of a trademark, copyright, or patent granting another party permission to use that intellectual property in a particular and specific way.
Anyone who wishes to use the MA name or logo, or its literature in a way other than those uses expressly allowed by the Service Manual, must get explicit written permission from MA World Services in the form of a licensing agreement.
These agreements between MA World Services and MA entities will be written as broadly as possible, and will be freely granted for any proposed uses of the MA Trademarks that aid in “carrying the message” of recovery consistent with MA’s “primary purpose,” such as on their websites, some flyers, or on chips ordered by the group or district. (Tradition Five)
Although within MA, we consider MA members, meetings, groups, regions and districts (“MA entities”) to be a part of MA World Services, under the law they are separate from the legal corporate entity of MA World Services. Accordingly, those MA entities need express written permission from World Services to use MA’s Trademarks as the implicit permission that has existed in the past is legally insufficient. We expect that it will only be necessary to sign such agreements once, unless there is a significant change in the future.
Licensing agreements can also be entered into with outside third-parties. For example, a licensing agreement could allow a publishing company to publish and distribute MA World Services’ copyrighted literature, or allow a chip manufacturer to make products, such as recovery-based chips, with MA’s Trademarks of the logo and/or name.