IP lawyers for the University of Texas are busy creatures, according to Eric Johnson:
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.
Yet all this activity has not really been as much of a profit center as you might think: the cost of running the IP program, Johnson calculates, may eat up something on the order of half the $800,000 in annual royalties brought in (via Ron Coleman).
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