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Copyright and trade marks

Last updated:
18 August 2025

LCF East Bank building with the UAL logo showing in the top right corner
London College of Fashion building at East Bank, 2025, UAL | Photograph: Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

Intellectual property rights are a set of legal rights which are held in creative works and inventions. Copyright and trade marks are 2 forms of intellectual property rights which commonly arise at UAL.

When using our brand, there are specific things you should be aware of in terms of copyright and trade marks.

Copyright is the type of intellectual property right which protects original creative works across artistic, dramatic, musical and literary contexts. It gives the creator, who is automatically the owner, exclusive rights to use, reproduce, distribute, perform, display or license their work.

Using student work

Generally, students own the intellectual property (“IP”) rights in any work they generate whilst they are students of UAL, and grant UAL certain rights to use that IP under the UAL IP Policy.

As a UAL staff member, you can:

  • Use images of work produced by a UAL student as part of their studies at the University, even if that student has since graduated, for educational, research, teaching and/or promotional purposes.
  • However, if current students or alumni request that their work is withdrawn from use, staff should comply with that request as a matter of good practice.

If you wish to use student work which has been uploaded to the Image Library or UAL Showcase, please check the licence terms for each of those resources before doing so.

If a third party wishes to use images of student work for press or promotional purposes, please speak to the UAL Legal Services team.

Commissioning creative work

When commissioning creative work, the commissioner (and not the creator) of the work will own the IP rights in that work.

If you need to commission some creative work, the best option is to use a supplier from the Creative Services Roster (UAL staff login required) or UAL Arts Temps. This is because:

  • Agencies on the Creative Services Roster have already agreed in their contract with UAL that the copyright of any commissioned work is owned by UAL.
  • Under the standard UAL Arts Temps Terms and Conditions, Arts Temps agree that all work created by them in the course of their work is owned by UAL.

Make sure that commissioned creative work is credited in line with our crediting guidelines.

A trade mark is a word, phrase or symbol that identifies a brand as the owner of any goods or services. The owner of a registered trade mark has the right to use that word, phrase or symbol in the designated territory for the designated goods and services.

At UAL, we have a portfolio of licenced trade marks which are a mixture of:

  1. Word marks i.e. the word itself with no graphic design
  2. Figurative marks/logos, which protects the words in the scope of a graphic design. See our logo guidelines for further advice.

These trade marks are valuable commercial assets for the University. We have to be particularly careful with our trade marks in the following scenarios:

Creating custom or modified versions of our logos (including for events)

Do not create custom and/or modified versions of our logo for a specific team, department and/or event at UAL:

  • Creating custom or modified logos can cause confusion, dilute UAL’s brand and even mean you are infringing upon our trade marks.

Using our name or logos for an international event

Our trade marks are only registered in certain territories; you can check where they are registered through WIPO’s Global Brand Database.

If the trade mark you would like to use isn’t registered in the country where the event is taking place, using our logo or name for the event would expose UAL to risk because:

  1. Our trade marks may not be protected.
  2. You could potentially infringe on another brand’s trade mark(s) that are registered in that territory.

If you would like to use a UAL name or logo in a country in which the name/logo isn’t registered, contact us at brand@arts.ac.uk and we will be able to advise.

Occasionally third parties use our trade marks and/or a logo which is very similar to our trade marks without our permission. This is likely to be trade mark infringement, which is illegal, can be detrimental to our brand and reputation and costly to the University.

If you see someone using our brand and claiming that they are endorsed by UAL or that they are in partnership/connected to UAL in some way and this appears to be without our permission, please contact us. Email brand@arts.ac.uk so we can investigate further and raise this with the Legal Services team if appropriate.