Summary of Responses for Corporate Logos and Trademark question

["Renee Hall" <chall38@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

Thanks to everyone for your quick and helpful responses. Please find a summary
of the three responses below.

Kind Regards,

Renee

1) "I can't speak for copyright law, but I can speak to some degree on
behalf of the companies.  My background includes a significant
professional stint as a technical writer.

Large companies (including your own university -- contact your
institutional advancement people) have "corporate identity standards."
 They dictate who may use logos, where they may be used, and how they
may be used.  The marketing and corporate identity folks at these
companies would probably tell you that they would prefer (or insist)
that their logos not be used at all.  I worked in IT after I was a
technical writer and would routinely ask naive-but-friendly
salespeople to please remove our logo from their sales presentations.

I would suggest talking to your IA/marketing and ask what they'd tell
an outside party, then apply that to the PowerPoint presentation.  If
you come to a different conclusion, I'd love to hear about it so that
I can change what I tell people.  :-)"

2) "I would think educational fair use is at play with the use of logos, but
I
would encourage him to cite the source of the logos.  I strongly encourage
our architecture and business students, who frequently use company logos or
images in their presentations to simply insert "source: www.xxx.xxx" on
their ppt slides so they can cite the source of the images they have
borrowed.

This is not a legal opinion, but rather a practical opinion. Outside of his
students, the companies themselves do not have access to his slides and I
would think attribution would be sufficient."

3) " I think this is acceptable under the TEACH Act, but probably constitutes
a violation of federal trademark law which does not have exclusions
for?educational uses. As such, I would advise the professor against doing
this.

You may wish to purchase a copy of the?new book?"Distance Learning and
Copyright" from the American Bar Association publishing website.It deals with
this and many other similar issues.?It has proven quite valuable to me in
understanding this complex area. The link is?
http://www.abanet.org/abastore/index.cfm?section=main&fm=Product.AddToCart&pi
d=5370163.."







Renee Hall
Distance Education Librarian
Johns Hopkins University
Sheridan Libraries
Entrepreneurial Library Program
3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
Phone: 410-516-6754
Fax:      410-516-6777
rhall@xxxxxxx