Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 4.djvu/344

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HARVARD LAW REVIEW.
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328 HARVARD LAW REVIEW, goods house under the sign and name of the "Golden Lion." The defendant attempted to begin a similar business under the same name and sign. An injunction issued. Fer curiam: "You have your choice of many signs which, as a mere attraction, or to give your store a marked designation, must answer a fair business purpose equally well." A late case in the Circuit Court of Pennsylvania* seems to rec- ognize the English doctrine that the fraud and not the analogy of a technical trade-mark is the important point. A bill alleged that the plaintiff alone possessed the right to bronze horseshoe nails as a trade-mark, and to sell the same under the trade-name; that the defendants sold bronze nails similar in appearance to those manufactured by the plaintiff; and that purchasers have been and are deceived into buying the articles so bronzed and sold by the defendants in the behef that they are of the manufacture of the plaintiff. The defendants demurred. Mr. Justice Bradley overruled the demurrer and gave the defendants time to answer. "Whether this is in itself a good trade-mark or not, it is a style of goods adopted by the complainants which the defendants have imi- tated for the purpose of deceiving, and have deceived, the public thereby, and induced them to buy their goods as the goods of the complainants. This is fraud. . . . The allegation that the com- plainants' peculiar style of goods is a trade-mark may be regarded as a matter of inducement to the charge of fraud. The latter is the substantial charge which we think the defendants should be required to answer." The French courts have gone very far towards preserving com- mercial rights and applying equitable principles to commercial compe- tition. There all "concurrence deloyale," all manoeuvres that cause prejudice to the name of a property, to the renown of a merchan- dise, or in lessening the custom due to rivals in business, is restrained and punished.^ Mr. Browne translates "concurrence ddloyale" by "unfair competition in business" (§ 43). Mr. Browne, in his chap- ter on Rights Analogous to Trade-marks, has collected a number of the French cases, and I shall cite some of them to illustrate how far the courts have gone in applying the principles which, it seems to me, ought to govern cases of this class. The plaintiffs were proprietors of a hat-shop founded twenty-

  • Putnam Nail Co. v. Bennett et al., 43 Fed. Rep. 800.

2 Say c. Duringer, 18 Annales, 148.