Use of College Logo on Prospective Student Profile

[lcam24]

My son is currently preparing letters to send to athletic coaches of the colleges he is applying to. Along with his letters, he is including a athletic profile of his accomplishments and achievements. It is a very creative and well done document, but he wishes to use the college logo as the background on each of the athletic profiles that he submits. Is this legal or does he need permission from each of the colleges to do this?

 

[Michael Wechsler]

This is a good question. Sometimes I think about the situation apart from technical violations and ask myself "what will realistically happen?"

I highly doubt that the university would even think of pursuing a copyright infringement case against one of their own applicants who is doing something creative with no profit motive. Why would they? If they pursued such a case it would only bring about significant negative publicity. Without getting into whether these actions fall within the fair use exception, my gut feeling is that this isn't an issue where the law would get involved - just my gut feeling without knowing more.