Baylor Is Suing Boston University For The Right To Claim The Most Generic Logo Possible

There are a number of learning institutions in the United States that are associated with the initials “BU.” Baylor and Boston University both fall under that umbrella, and one of them has summoned the other to court due to the similarities of the logos both schools have adopted.

America is home to dozens of schools that can be shortened to “BU” thanks to their official designation as a university associated with a single word that begins with the letter “B.”

Now, I admit I may be biased as someone who was born and raised in New England and graduated from Boston College, and while that second distinction makes me obliged to never go out of my way to give Boston University more credit than absolutely necessary, I feel like our hated rival down the street from Commonwealth Avenue has done a pretty good job cementing itself as the BU.

However, I’m aware there are plenty of people who’d argue Baylor University has earned the right to stake that claim, and that school has decided to reunite a decades-old beef involving a particular logo.

Baylor is suing Boston University over the interlocking “BU” logo

Boston University can trace its roots back to a group of Methodist ministers from Beantown who opened a seminary in Vermont in 1839 and eventually established another one back home close to 30 years later before what was known as “Boston Theological Institute” rebranded to the current moniker in 1869.

That revamp came around 25 years after the Baptists who founded Baylor University secured the charter that Texas handed out to the Waco-based institution in 1845, which means the Bears do have the right to say they beat the Terriers to the “BU” punch.

Baylor claims early iterations of a logo featuring those two letters interlocked were first used in the 1910s, but it took more than 50 years for the one that’s still featured on the uniforms of its athletic teams to come into existence.

Boston University, on the other hand, has historically opted for a logo that simply features those two letters next to each other, although it has experimented with one that does bear an uncanny resemblance to the style Baylor claimed the rights to when it filed for a trademark in 1987.

According to The San Antonio Express-News, the Boston-based BU attempted to block the Texas-based one from securing those rights before the two parties entered a “coexistence agreement” that saw the former agree to avoid using a similar logo.

However, Baylor has asserted that Boston University violated that pact in a lawsuit where it claims a number of pieces of merchandise emblazoned with that particular “BU” logo have been sold by the school with a red-and-white color scheme that the plantiff argues doesn’t do enough to differentiate the two (Baylor also alleges it’s been adopted by a number of club sports teams, including sailing, women’s rugby, and men’s volleyball).

It might seem like a silly issue, but proactive enforcement is essentially a requirement for trademark holders who want to avoid their intellectual property from being seized by another party or genericized to the point where it becomes part of the public domain.

All signs point to the BU that was named as a defendant in the lawsuit simply admitting it screwed up and possibly paying some small damages to compensate Baylor, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.