USC vs. USC, and no this is NOT a bowl game preview
It appears that even Institutes of Higher Learning are not impervious to plagiarizing one another. Pass off someone else’s thesis as your own, and you get kicked out of school. But pass off another school’s logo as your own, then take them to court so they can no longer use it?
The University of Southern California is doing just that to the University of South Carolina.
This story has some of the details of the lawsuit. The University of South Carolina has been around since the turn of the 1900’s, but do a search for ‘USC’ within the almighty Google, and see which school shows up first in the search engine ranking.
This story will be interesting to follow, because it shows:
1. Just because you are using a logo first, does that mean that you are protected from another person stealing it?
2. Even large Universities, with some of the most creative people on the planet, are not immune to copying another large University’s logo.
3. Will popularity as seen in Google’s results, be a factor in deciding who has the right to use the interlocking letters? If consumers confuse one with the other, and it is shown that more people associate the interlocking letters with the California school, will that sway the judges?
We think that they should battle it out in a giant sports/academics tournament. Gamecocks vs. Trojans, winner takes all rights to the logo, and the other school is forced to become a 2-year Junior College in humiliation. Errrrr wait a second, the Snow College Badgers might have something to say about that…
