universities' preferred names

[ClemVegas]

Originally Posted by davey123

This is true. However, there was a huge lawsuit regarding which school was entitled to call themselves USC. University of Southern California won because the courts ruled that most people associate USC with So. Cal. Thus, they are USC and the University of South Carolina is UofSC.

That's not what the lawsuit was over. It was over logos used on baseball caps. Southern Cal said SC's logo was too similar. The two logos are simply the letters S and C interlocking. https://patentlyo.com/patent/2010/01...-carolina.html

Apparently Southern Cal fans were buying SC baseball hats by mistake. I would not have confused the two because SC doesn't have gold in their school colors.

SC can use the abbreviation USC if they want to and I'm sure they do at times.

[davey123]

Originally Posted by Simpsonvilllian

That's not what the lawsuit was over. It was over logos used on baseball caps. Southern Cal said SC's logo was too similar. The two logos are simply the letters S and C interlocking. https://patentlyo.com/patent/2010/01...-carolina.html

Apparently Southern Cal fans were buying SC baseball hats by mistake. I would not have confused the two because SC doesn't have gold in their school colors.

SC can use the abbreviation USC if they want to and I'm sure they do at times.

I have two friends who are professors at UofSC. After the court ruling, they mentioned that the provost notified everyone that UofSC could not "officially" call themselves USC any longer. And, in fact, they now refer to the school as UofSC.

[ClemVegas]

The court ruling never had anything to do with use of USC. SC and Southern Cal had agreed back in the 1980s to both use USC.

SC was trying to trademark SC because people typically associate SC with South Carolina. All the court ruling did is prevent SC from trademarking SC because numerous other colleges also use SC such as Santa Clara. The court said that there is no evidence that people associate SC exclusively with South Carolina.

From SC's website, Welcome to Trademark and Licensing Program

SC's trademarks include the word USC but not UofSC. In addition to those words, Logos and trademarks include: Interlocking USC, Interlocking SC (baseball/softball)

SO I misunderstood the court ruling and SC can still use an interlocking SC baseball hat logo. I saw some SC baseball hats available with the interlocking SC logo on an sports apparel website. It seems unlikely that SC and southern Cal apparel are both going to be available for sale at local retailers anyway given the distance between the two fanbases.

SC's decision to use UofSC does not appear to be based on this court ruling and I only see it used for social media purposes. They mostly likely use it for social media because southern Cal had already created USC handles on social media. UofSC isn't on any apparel that I have seen. SC probably doesn't have a problem using UofSC for social media given it tried to trademark SC.

SC's main logo is a C with a gamecock inside of it.

[brodie734]

Originally Posted by Clevelander17

Fun fact: All of the schools that used to be in the Big Eight Conference arrange their initials ending in "U." Apparently it was some conference standard at the time.

University of Colorado: CU
University of Kansas: KU
University of Missouri: MU
University of Nebraska: NU
University of Oklahoma: OU

It had something to do with the way the conferences were ordered in newspaper box scores in the mid-20th century... after the Big 10, SEC, and whatever the Pac-10 was at the time. Hence UK is Kentucky, UO is Oregon, UM is half a dozen schools, etc.