Another type of situation hat might be up the alley of the OP. Years ago, there were lots of small, local businesses that would custom-make you a computer. You could select a case, motherboard, processor, memory size (possibly including a choice of brand), video card, modem, hard disk, etc., and they would put it together for you and sell it to you.
Is it safe to assume that these small companies all had official permission from Intel, AMD, 3Com, ATI, NVidia, Hayes, Sony, Seagate, Connor, Western Digital, IBM, Samsung, and all the other companies that made computer parts, or else they were breaking some law by putting a Sony CD-ROM in your computer without official permission from Sony to use their product? In this case, it was rather obvious that what you were being sold was made of components from all these companies.