Wednesday, December 5, 2007

You be the judge

The UW-Madison is taking the "unprecedented" step of suing the pants off a small, liberal arts college in Kansas that, they say, is infringing on trademark law by using a W logo that's too similar to the UW's own "Motion W" logo.

It seems like much ado about very little, but I'll let you all be the judge:

The UW's "Motion W" logo











Washburn's W logo










OK, sure, I can see where they're fairly similar. But hey, one's blue and the other is red. There's also no curve at the bottom of the Washburn logo. I don't know, my personal take on it is that this is a fairly frivolous lawsuit, and that the UW should probably just drop it. But then, I don't know a whole lot about trademark law. How similar does something have to be to be considered infringement?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I think they reason they're so touchy about that Motion W logo is that they make tons of money off of that stuff. I can't see how anyone could possibly mistake the blue W for the Motion W especially since the school colors are so closely tied with its identity. Basically I'm with you - much ado about very little.

The Lost Albatross