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Colleges getting bitter about copycat logos

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by JackReacher, Oct 22, 2010.

  1. e_bowker

    e_bowker Member

    Talking to an SEC marketing guy yesterday, he said the little tweaks high schools make to the uniforms to customize them make that a hard area to pursue.
    One school in Mississippi, Brookhaven, dresses exactly like Ole Miss. Same navy blue uniforms and gray pants, and they even have "Ole Brook" instead of "Ole Miss" on the helmet in script. Hattiesburg High (and a bunch of Louisiana high schools) use an LSU motif, but substitute "HHS" or "LHS" or whatever for "LSU" on the helmet.
    Our school that has run afoul of Florida, Vicksburg High, has a couple different uniforms. Their new ones have the Florida gator head on a hip patch and a sleeve. The helmet sticker has the gator head combined with an LSU style "VHS". The SEC guy said, in most cases, those tweaks are enough to differentiate.
     
  2. crimsonace

    crimsonace Well-Known Member

    And, interestingly, the Indianapolis Catholic school (Cathedral) was using the Irish nickname (and I believe was using the logo) before Notre Dame was.

    However, the rule in trademark law is use it or lose it.
     
  3. Mystery Meat II

    Mystery Meat II Well-Known Member

    Penn State's going to have a harder time proving its case, I bet.

    Yeah, colleges have the absolute right to protect their marks. If they don't, they fall prey to trademark dilution, where a mark is used so frequently that it becomes part of the lexicon and rights are stripped from the holder. If you took an aspirin and rode an elevator today, you just used two former trademarks. That's why Xerox used to spend tons of money in journalism trade mags (back in the glory days when that phrase could be made plural), begging newsgatherers not to use Xerox as a verb.
     
  4. EagleMorph

    EagleMorph Member

    Love how media entities keep recycling stories.

    RivalsHigh/Yahoo did this back in August.

    http://highschool.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=1117999
     
  5. micropolitan guy

    micropolitan guy Well-Known Member

    Delaware has winged helmets because Tubby Raymond was an ex-Michigan QB and introduced them when he became coach in 1966 (or so I've always been told).

    Fritz Crisler used winged the winged helmet decal at Princeton and brought it with him to Michigan.

    The local school at my first job had maroon and gold uniforms and a block M as its logo. Not hard to tell who they were mimicking.
     
  6. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    Usually, they're not. Once they run into a school really serious about enforcing copyrights/trademarks, they'll get ass-kicked in court.

    Take the fucking energy you put into figuring out how to tweak the official logos you're hijacking into designing one of your own.
     
  7. Shoeless Joe

    Shoeless Joe Active Member

    Starman, not every school has the resources or talent to draw up their own stuff. We've got plenty of 400-500-student rural schools in our neck of the woods that I can assure you do not. Their helmet logos are whatever they can get from the equipment dealer in a given year. Most of those are mass produced copies of some university or pro team.

    Sure, some metro school that has the ability to do that can. But everywhere isn't Dade County or Dallas suburb. If a small rural school with 30 players on the team tried to get something unique by way of decals, the setup fee alone with kill their budget.

    Many small schools also don't have music departments much less bands. And the ones that do sure as hell don't have the ability to compose a fight song. They struggle to get through the anthem.
     
  8. Shoeless Joe

    Shoeless Joe Active Member

    You must have gone to Memphis to Central where they use an 'H' High School.
     
  9. Steak Snabler

    Steak Snabler Well-Known Member

    I'll Never Tell can fill in the correct details, but I know Talladega (Ala.) High School went to Texas Tech when they wanted to use the "TT" logo (Talladega is the Tigers). I think the school gave them permission, but only they donated $100 or so to Tech's general scholarship fund.
     
  10. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    Nobody in the whole community of Talladega could come up with some reasonably creative other way to arrange two "T's" to make a logo??

    Hell, send me $99, I'll have it ready for you in 90 seconds.
     
  11. KYSportsWriter

    KYSportsWriter Well-Known Member

    Using a college's logo is setting a bad example for students?
     
  12. Clerk Typist

    Clerk Typist Guest

    Starman, did you license that video clip running under your name, or are we talking copyright infringement here?
     
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