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Universities have often been very lax in protecting their names and symbols such as their crests. Oxford is a case in point as it failed to register the coat of arms of the university which had been in use for centuries and so had to develop a variant with a belt drawn around it, which was subsequently protected. The crest without the belt appears on tee-shirts and other items sold across the world, with no royalty on the proceeds due to the university.

An even more surprising omission was the fact that Oxford’s enormously successful publishing house, Oxford University Press, which dates from 1473, did not protect its name until the 1960s. At that time Robert Maxwell decided to publish an Oxford Dictionary of Spelling. The university took his company to court on the grounds that the book was passing itself off as being from the University Press. They lost. It was decided to appeal and fortunately for the university the case came up before the sparkling eyes of Lord Denning.

The corporate entity bringing the case was ‘The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford’. Denning observed that he was a plaintiff being both a Master, having the degree of MA, and a former scholar of the university, but neither side objected. The case of Maxwell’s company was that it was indeed based in Oxford so that the title of the work was accurate. Lord Denning observed that the defendants were located in the suburb of Headington and that the university would not object if the defendants’ work were called the Headington Dictionary of Spelling. The defendants lost in the appeal.

Another similar tale involves a pharmaceutical company based in Boston tried to use the name ‘Veritas’, the Harvard motto, but were prevented by the university, becoming instead Vertex. Nonetheless some bright young man in the UK did in fact register the name for use in Europe.

These anecdotes, though slightly comic, do illustrate just how careful academic bodies need to be to defend their trade marks and names. Perhaps the area where most care needs to be taken in registering names is with domain names for use on the internet. Many institutions have suffered at the hands of unscrupulous souls who register obvious names in advance of the legitimate body getting around to the task.