Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/270

250 2SO HARVARD LAW REVIEW. "A. Yes." Upon this evidence, Collins, J., granted an injunction restrain- ing the defendants from continuing to use the words " Camel Hair" in such manner as to deceive purchasers into the belief that they were buying the belting of the complainant's manufac- ture and thereby passing off their belting as and for the belting of the complainant. The court of appeals^ reversed this decision and entered judgment for the defendant. The House of Lords, on the other hand, reversed the decision of the court of appeals, declared that judgment ought to be entered for the plaintiff and ordered an injunction restraining the defendants from using the words " Camel Hair " as descriptive of, or in connection with, belt- ing manufactured by them or either of them, or belting not being of the plaintiff's manufacture sold or offered for sale by them or either of them without clearly distinguishing such belting from the belting of the plaintiff. Halsbury, L, C, said, " For myself, I believe the principle of law may be very plainly stated, and that is, that nobody has any right to represent his goods as the goods of somebody else. How far the use of particular words, signs or pictures does or does not come up to the proposition which I have enunciated in each particular case must always be a question of evidence ; and the more simple the phraseology, the more like it is to a mere descrip- tion of the article sold, the greater becomes the difficulty of proof; but if the proof establishes the fact the legal consequence appears to follow." Lord Herschell discusses the matter more fully. Commenting on the statement of the Master of the Rolls that you cannot restrain a man from telling the "simple truth;" and that this was all the defendants had done when they called their belting " Camel Hair Belting," he says, " I think the fallacy Hes in over- looking the fact that a word may acquire in a trade a secondary signification differing from its primary one, and that if it is used to persons in the trade who will understand it and be known and intended to understand it in its secondary sense it will none the less be a falsehood that in its primary sense it may be true. A man who uses language which will convey to persons reading or hearing it a particular idea which is false, and who knows and intends this to be the case, is surely not to be absolved from a 1 Lord Esher, M. R., Lopes and Rigby, L. JJ.