UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Monday, April 28,1997
5A
The Hawk Police
Royalties income
Royalties spending
Continued from Page 1B
40%
KU Endowment
Association scholarships
vendor selling 100 unauthorized "Beware of Phog" T-shirts with a fuzzy-looking Jayhawk printed on the back this fall. The T-shirts were only on the shelves for a couple of hours.
The vendor, whom Vander Tuig refused to name, was unaware that the T-shirts were unlicensed. Because the vendor surrendered the T-shirts immediately, the University did not bring an action.
Vander Tuig said he never would have approved the shirts because Phog Allen's family does not permit reference to him for commercial use.
The Chase
KU is not the only institution chasing logo bootleggers.
Michael Drucker, associate legal counsel at the Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC) in Atlanta, which helps police peddlers at major sporting events, speculated that universities across the country lost tens of thousands of dollars every year to unlicensed products.
During this year's NCAA tournament, for instance, local police arrested unlicensed vendors in Winston-Salem, N.C.; San Jose, Calif.; San Antonio, Texas; Indianapolis, Ind.; and Cincinnati, Ohio, for selling 1,000 to 1,500 unlicensed items. The items bore the trademarks of the NCAA and of the 17 universities participating in the tournaments in those five sites.
One of the arrested vendors already had been arrested twice in major sports tournaments during the past three months.
"Some travel across the country to sell counterfeit merchandise," Drucker said. "We are beginning to find that people come from a certain area in the country. We think they are tied in together."
Drucker's company still is investigating, he said.
Drucker said the logo counterfeiters seemed to be concentrated around Los Angeles, New York City, Washington D.C. and Dallas.
schools
Agents usually can detect counterfeit merchandise from the inferior quality of products, improper trademark prints and the absence of a company's name on license labels.
Also, because they tend to use one design for mass production, it is relatively easy to spot bootleggers once they develop their particular design, Drucker said.
"They have taken huge chunks of money, but the number is dwindling every year thanks to local police, CLC and membership institutions," he said.
The License
To protect the KU name from logo bootleggers, the University requires all licensees to put Collegiate Licensed Products labels on all products.
But some vendors might even forge the red label, Abbott said.
The University is one of 100 institutions that has joined this independent licensing program based at the University of Iowa. Licensees with agreements with participating institutions must print their company's names on the labels and place the labels somewhere on the products.
"I don't know any," he said. "But it's certainly possible."
Mark Abbott, licensing administrator at the University of Iowa, said that licensees cooperated with the program because the labels show support from those
There are ways around the Hawk police.
The Gray Area
The Lawrence Journal World prints its own version of the Jayhawk on the top of the front page for KU sports stories.
Ralph Gage, general manager for The Journal-World, said that the paper decided to use the Jayhawk about six months ago.
"We wanted to have a modern, more aggressive-looking Jayhawk, but it is exclusively ours." Gage said.
The Journal-World pays no royalty to KU, and the paper's Jayhawk does not match the Jayhawk design that the University regulates.
"They are allowed to do so only in the news context," he said. "It falls into a category of fair use. They have the ability to do that in non-commercial situations."
Vander Tuig said the paper had a First Amendment right to draw its own Jayhawk.
But even The Journal-World's Jayhawk could be violating the KU trademark if the paper sells products which bear the Jayhawk, Vander Tuig said.
But the First Amendment right apparently did not apply when The University Daily Kansan printed its Feb. 3 front page on T-shirts and tried to sell them as souvenirs of the KU men's basketball team's 22 consecutive wins. Two hundred T-shirts were on display for sale at the Kansas Union Bookstore.
Gage said the paper never will use the Jayhawk design other than for the newspaper.
Vander Tuig said that the front page itself was copyrighted by the Kansan, but the paper's right did not extend to commercial use of KU athletes' photos.
Tom Eblen, general manager for the Kansan, said that when the KU men's basketball team won the national championship in 1988, the Kansan sold victory posters for $2. Eblen said that at that time it did not create any problem with trademark licensing.
"Rules have changed," he said. "Certainly there is an open question as to what can be printed and what cannot be printed."
Jim Lucas, sales representative for Jan Sport, which is based in Wisconsin, said that after the loss to Arizona, his company threw away the designs for KU T-shirts.
KU licensees are gearing up for next year after designs for KU-NCAA final four T-shirts were ruined when the men's basketball team lost to Arizona.
Riding the wave? Missing the boat?
"We did not make KU T-shirts before they lost, but we threw away artwork," Lucas said. "I hope we can make T-shirts for KU next year."
KU might be missing a chance to make more money from its Jayhawk licensing business, some collegiate sports marketing sources say.
Other universities screen prospective licences and collect higher royalty revenues.
Rick Van Brimmer, assistant director of Trademark and Licensing services at Ohio State University, said about 400 licensees are authorized to use the university's trademark, which is 100 licensees fewer than KU.
KU doesn't reject applications for using the Jayhawk unless the product design, product quality or the manufacturing distribution capability are obviously poor, said Paul Vander Tulg, University of Kansas Licensing Administrator.
Ohio State University earned more than $2 million annually from the university-licensed products. KU made only $590,000 last year.
Ohio State, on the other hand, turns down hundreds of applications from products, which appear similar to ones already in the set.
market
applicantsneed to expand existing distribution channels in order to be licensed by the university, Van Brimmer said.
The Future?
"We do accept new companies, but we are looking for companies, which can increase the size of a pie," he said.
Richard Irwin, director of University of Memphis bureau of sports and leisure commerce, said exclusive licensing agreements were becoming popular in professional sports institutions as well as at the college level.
Irwin's marketing theory is to have numerous licensees in the same category, creating an over-saturated collegiate merchandise market. Exclusive licensing programs limit the number of licensees and facilitate detection of counterfeit merchandise. Exclusivity gives licensees an incentive to provide better products, and it potentially can bring more money to licensers.
"Exclusive licensing agreements make it easier to manage the program," Irwin said. "Potentially, licensers can get more money from it. It's certainly possible for universities like KU, Nebraska and Colorado to have exclusive agreements."
Vander Tuig said it was not fair to compare royalty revenues without considering other factors. Larger enrollments, more alumni and larger audiences for sports events may explain higher royalty revenue at Ohio State University.
"I don't think we are having an over-saturated market," Vander Tuig said. "Local manufacturers are more in touch with the University. How could we drop them when the present system is working?"
Vander Tuig said that he did not think that the KU's non-exclusive agreement policy was causing any problems.
Irwin conceded that exclusive agreements could be a tough option for public institutions.
"It's a philosophical issue," he said. "It comes down to whether they want to exclude local producers. The reality is can you exclude producers who have been with you for a long time."
Van Brimmer said Ohio State University used to have a non-exclusive licensing agreement until six years ago. The number of licensees grew to 700, and the paper work became enormous. Some licensees were not as aggressive in selling the products, Van Brimmer said.
Van Brimmer still keeps his eyes open to see whether current licensees do their job effectively.
Ohio State University has gradually reduced the number of licensees over the last six years but still keeps many local manufactures who can provide unique and niche-oriented products to local fans.
"It took six years to get to this point," Van Brimmer said. "But we constantly have to look at it. The number will keep changing."
Students face risk of AIDS
By Emily Vrabac Kansan staff writer
April is AIDS Awareness Month, and the Douglas County AIDS Project wants local residents to know that Lawrence is not immune to the deadly virus.
The Centers for Disease Control
and
tion estimates
that 1 million Americans are HIV-positive, and more than 500,000 Americans have full-blown AIDS.
Douglas County AIDS Project has observed several events this month, including red ribbon day on April 9 and the Walk for Health on Saturday.
Janine Gracy, coordinator of health promotion and education at Watk i n s Memorial Health Center, said there should be particular interest in AIDS among college students.
AIDS statistics
"There has been an increase in the number of heterosexuals that are HIV-positive, and teenagers are a growing group," Gracy said.
Leading cause of death among men aged 25-44
Third-leading cause of death among women aged 25-44.
Sixth-leading cause of death among people aged 15-24
As of March 1997, CDC reports 581,429 known AIDS cases in the United States.
In fact, the CDC statistics
United States Global AIDS Policy Coalition estimates that by the year 2000, there will be 110 million cases of HIV and 25 million AIDS cases worldwide.
show that AIDS is the sixth-leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 24. It is the leading cause of death for men aged 25 to 44.
"Students automatically consider themselves exempt from the risk groups, and that's simply not true," Gracy said.
The CDC says that between 40,000 and 80,000 Americans become infected with HIV each year from behaviors that are preventable.
Randall Rock, chief of staff at Watkins, said the health center averaged about 50 to 60 people per month who came in for AIDS screenings.
"Luckily, at this point, we're able to report that it's very rare to be positive," Rock said.
More than 1,000 students visited Watkins with concerns related to sexually transmitted diseases between June 1996 and March 1997, Rock said.
"These numbers do not include visits to the Douglas County Health Department, Johnson County Health Department or private doctors," Rock said.
Watkins health educator Gracy said that categorizing students into risk groups was not as vital now as it had been in previous years. She said the main emphasis was that students needed to use condoms for all varieties of sexual contact, whether vaginal, oral or anal.
The Global AIDS Policy Coalition estimates that by the year 2000, there will be 110 million people with the HIV virus worldwide and. 25 million AIDS cases.
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