Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/320

294 294 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. an equal right to It, why it is fraudulent in one of these others to exercise his right, and why the plaintiff has not himself to blame if he suffers harm thereby, inasmuch as with him it lay at the out- set to select a non-descriptive word as his trade name. It seems an undefined jurisdiction for courts to enter upon, and either the public must submit to the first appropriation of a descriptive trade name, or use the descriptive name for descriptive purposes at the peril of being branded as fraudulent. If the cases be read as show- ing that under certain circumstances a right to a descriptive word may be acquired by user, the public has no means of knowing, with- out experiment, what will be held to be a sufficient user to give an exclusive right, and individuals must determine this at their peril. In this country, with the exception of the case of Gebbie v. Stitt,^ mentioned below, the courts have gone no further in protect- ing geographical trade names than to give protection as against a defendant who could not truthfully use it.^ The doctrine of Wotherspoon v. Currie, Thompson v. Mont- gomery, and Powell v. Birmingham Brewery Co., was repudiated in Elgin Butter Co. v, Sands,^ and the recent case of Reddaway v. Banham * seems to indicate that a reaction may be looked for against the abandonment of the safe ground of a property right in plaintiff as a basis of relief. In Reddaway v. Banham,* the plaintiff had made belts of camel's hair for many years, and had sold them under that name. The defendant began to make belts of camel's hair, and to sell them under that name. Held, that the defendant was entitled to call his goods by a name which was merely a sub- stantially correct description of them, although, by reason of the plaintiff having for many years sold similar goods under the same name, purchasers might be thereby misled into the belief that they were buying the goods of the plaintiff. ^ Wotherspoon v. Currie and Thompson v. Montgomery show the extreme limit reached in geographical trade name cases, while Gebbie v. Stitt^ represents the extreme to which a court in this country has gone in such a case. There, upon facts almost identi- cal with those of Wotherspoon v. Currie, except that there was evidence of fraudulent intention beyond that afforded by the mere 1 82 Hun, 93. 8 1^5 111, 127. 2 Note 2, page 292. * [1895] i Q. B. 286. ^ See De Long v, De Long, 39 N. Y. Supp. 903; 7 App. Div. 33; Coats v, Merrick Thread Co., 36 Fed. Rep. 324; 149 U. S. 562; Lorillard v. Pride, 28 Fed. Rep. 434. « 82 Hun, 93.