My alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, has distinguished itself as a trademark bully, happy to squelch free speech in the pursuit of licensing revenues.
Here's just one example: A couple years ago, they sued an outfit making t-shirts, sold to fans of rival Texas A&M, that depicted a broken Longhorns logo with the taunt, "Saw 'em off." (Fellow UT alum Siva Vaidhyanathan's take is here.)
And I remember when I was going to school at UT, in the early 1990s, the university was hassling local business with "Longhorn" in their names. Since then, UT has been very aggressive about trademark issues.
So with all that, how many millions of dollars has UT actually brought in to pay faculty and help students? You might be surprised. Annual royalty payments are only about $800,000.
That is a triffling amount of money. And, of course, there are expenses. UT maintains an Office of Trademark Licensing to manage the branding operations. Let's assume that the office employs only the equivalent of two full-time employees. Salaries, benefits, and overhead would likely be a minimum of $200,000. Add to that a share of the in-house counsel's budget and legal fees incurred for waging litigation warfare on hapless t-shirt makers, and that's got to be at the very least about $250,000 annually. But even assuming it is significantly less, it is hard to believe UT clears more than $450,000 from trademark licensing. And it might be much, much less.
To put that in perspective, that doesn't even cover a quarter of the gratuitous $2 million annual bonus that UT has recently started guaranteeing for football coach Mack Brown. And Coach Brown didn't even have to sign on to a contract extension in return. (His total compensation this year will be $5 million or more.) Of course, even Coach Brown's salary is small compared to the $87.5 million in revenues brought in by UT's football program in 2008.
It's hard to believe that the IP thuggery is worth it.
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