The README template writes trademark and copyright claims on an organization's behalf #36

Status: Verified during the Pick Your AI rollout (reproduced, or read directly in the code).

Part of epic: Epic: Keep brand families isolated (no CompleteTech text in other orgs).

Summary

Even with the right brand name, the License row asserts "<Brand> names and logos are reserved and are not licensed for reuse…" and, for private repositories, "Proprietary. Copyright (c) <year> <Brand>. All rights reserved." No owner has decided those claims.

Evidence

• scripts/ctshowcase/readme.py License row selection (t1_mit, t2_mit, private).
• The generated sentence is in six public Pick-Your-AI PRs (docs: add Pick Your AI showcase banner, card, icon and README header Pick-Your-AI/pick-your-ai-catalog-pipeline#85, docs: add Pick Your AI showcase banner, card, icon and README header Pick-Your-AI/pick-your-ai-apple#457, docs: add Pick Your AI showcase banner, card, icon and README header Pick-Your-AI/pick-your-ai-android#763, docs: add Pick Your AI showcase banner, card, icon and README header Pick-Your-AI/pick-your-ai-datasets#76, docs: add Pick Your AI showcase banner, card, icon and README header Pick-Your-AI/pick-your-ai-papers#168, docs: add Pick Your AI showcase banner, card, icon and README header Pick-Your-AI/pick-your-ai-research#518) and one private-repository PR.

Impact

Legal assertions about a co-owned organization are published without the owners choosing them.

Proposed fix

Write legal wording only from an explicit per-org setting; otherwise log needs-input:license-wording and leave the License row unchanged.

Acceptance criteria

• No trademark/copyright sentence is generated unless brand.yaml provides it for that org.
• Existing LICENSE references stay factual.

Tasks

Each task below is a sub-issue.

Prior work

Prior work: open PR #20 (opt-in --allow-t3 and the Pick Your AI family), open #7 and PR #13 (variant J badges), merged PRs #14 to #19 (icon art-direction path, UTF-8 output, registry-free org health and label planning, Windows test portability, footer URL repair) and closed issues #8 to #12. Nothing here duplicates those; where an item is already handled it is linked, not refiled.

Fresh VM verification: not run. Findings were verified on a Windows host; hosted CI is separate evidence.