British law and intellectual property

Factual Questions
1

I used the University of St. Andrews emblem in my webpage to link to the school. Now in the US I’m pretty sure that such use of a logo or emblem would fall under fair use under copyright law and I do not believe I would be violating any trademark law since I am using the logo to represent the entity itself.

But I don’t know if that is the same under British law. Copyright terms are the same under the Berne Convention but are all the nuances such as fair use or parody the same? And I don’t know how trademarks work. Can anyone help me out before I get a letter from Lord Lyon?

2

Are you talking about the shield described in the second item on this page?

That’s part of the university’s coat of arms. Its use is controlled not so much by copyright laws or general intellectual property law, but by the law of heraldry. The arms are granted to the university, and only the university has the right to display or use them. You have no right to do so, but unless the university objects nobody else is in a position to stop you. If the university does object, in order to stop you they don’t have to show that they themselves are using the arms, or that your use of the arms is causing confusion in the public mind, or any of the other things that they might have to show if they were fighting the case on trademark or passing off or other principles; they just have to show that the crown has granted the arms to them.

3

Scotland.
From the university’s website:

Terms and Conditions

By accessing this website you accept and agree to the following terms and conditions:

Definitions

The University of St Andrews is situated in Fife, Scotland in the United Kingdom. The term ‘the University of St Andrews’ or ‘the University’ shall include, without limitation, its faculties, schools, research centres and administrative units.

‘University network’ means any resources which are used for the transmission or reception (either wholly or in part) of any data (including voice, email, video, Web content or any other types or formats of data), which are owned or operated by or on behalf of the University.

‘University services’ means any and all services provided by the University or on its behalf for use by its community and members by means of, or relating to the use of, access to or interaction with, the University network. This includes the provision of any applications, information, services or facilities (either accessed directly or indirectly via the University network), email, Web applications, computing facilities (including but not limited to workstations, access services for personal systems such as dial up, VPN, wireless, etc.).

Accessibility

The University is committed to making its website as accessible and usable as possible, irrespective of the browser or platform used. Our central website has been designed to conform to Section 508 and W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) standards.

Copyright

Unless stated otherwise, the copyright and other intellectual property rights in all text, images and other material on this website are owned by the University of St Andrews or its licensors and may not be reproduced without prior written permission.

See also pages on Copyright and Electronic Copyright.

Trademarks

The University crest, logos and trade marks used and displayed on our website are the University’s registered and unregistered trade marks, or those of others. You may not use these trade marks without our prior written consent, or that of the relevant owner.

4

Note that people and institutions commonly claim rights they don’t actually have, either through ignorance or sheer bullying, and you don’t have to respect any claim which isn’t backed up by a law you’re subject to.

The NFL loves to do this crap:

5

I suspect that even in the US things aren’t quite that simple, because that would be open to abuse.
For example, if there was a page selling some herbal supplement, that prominently displayed the FDA logo, it wouldn’t matter one jot if clicking on it went to the FDA’s site. They would still likely object to that use.

6

I don’t see any problem if you embed an image using HTML embedding code.

The image is stored and served from the University computer so you are not copying it.

They may get annoyed with you doing that, but it’s not a breach of copyright. Some sites use an ‘anti-hotlink’ process to stop you linking to their image but it’s very rare.

The best they can do is a civil suit about misrepresentation, but if the context of your web page doesn’t imply you are part of them you are on safe ground.

7

IIRC from my intellectual property class a few years ago, the OP’s website must actually be engaged in commerce for the trademark holder to have legal grounds to object, and there must also be reasonable likelihood that his consumers would get the impression that the trademark holder endorses his products.

In your hypo, that would be absolutely true.

8

There’s no savings for ‘parody’ here.

9

A good parallel example for legal third party use: a magazine (or newspaper, tv show, etc.) could include a picture of the McDonald’s logo (or even one of their signs) in an article about McDonald’s. Legally, there’s no relevant difference between your webpage and a nationally syndicated tv show.

The only real problem would be if your usage somehow implied an endorsement by the trademark owner. That’s easily remedied by a disclaimer, and a bit of common sense in the design (e.g. don’t put the logo and school name at the top of the page unless you’re talking about the school, say “them” and “they” instead of “us” and “we”, etc.).