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BOE discusses logo licensing, hears facilities update at July meeting

by

Emily Featherston

The Vestavia Hills Board of Education’s regular July meeting saw a packed house, with many citizens there for one topic: logos.

After seeing significant chatter on Facebook, Superintendent Sheila Phillips said the board wanted to have an open discussion about the current status of the school district’s logos and trademarks, and a bid that was set to close that afternoon.

Intellectual property attorney Pam Smith, who Phillips explained the board has been working with throughout its recent rebranding process, spoke to the board and audience briefly about the effort over the last few years, and where the board is headed next.

Smith said she and the staff have been working with the Alabama trademark office to finalize marks for the district’s newest logos, a process similar to what was done with the interlocking “VH” a while back.

Not only does the process protect the intellectual property the board spent money on during the rebranding process, Smith said, but “it’s also protecting [the district’s] brand by being sure you’re enforcing the mark and enforcing how it’s used.”

At the end of June, the district released an invitation for bid for a contract firm that would handle the licensing and trademark enforcement for the district.

While she said she could not go into details about the request for bids itself due to state bid law, she said the basic idea was to have a firm to handle the administrative tasks associated with branding and trademarks–whether that be enforcing the marks by issuing cease-and-desist letters, or by doing the legwork for contracts with those wishing to license the marks for commercial use.

And though the administrative processes would be taken off the board’s plate, Smith emphasized that the board still had complete control.

“At all times you are going to have control over the licensing process,” she said. “It’s not a situation where you are turning over the ownership of these marks, or you’re turning over the responsibility for the marks themselves to a vendor.”

Local business owners, including Dan Moran of Rocky Ridge Hardware and others, expressed their concern of the breadth of the contract out for bid, as well as their concern that their businesses would be precluded from licensing school logos due to the cost of a license.

Emily Featherston

Phillips said the board was sensitive to those concerns, and that the effort was not aimed at pulling back on local businesses’ ability to license.

“It’s intended to protect it, actually,” she said.

The language of the bid indicated that the process going forward could have a proposal in front of the board as early as the end of August, but no discussion was had on specifically when that would take place.

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