The CREATe Trade Mark Seminar Series: Inaugural online talk by Dr Jennifer Davis on Trade Mark History

As previously announced, this Spring we launched the CREATe Trade Mark Seminar Series, which comprise two on-line talks about trade marks each term, one on trade mark history and one on innovative methodologies in contemporary trade mark research. The full details of our inaugural talk are below.

SEMINAR 1: TRADE MARK HISTORY 

Time and place: Wednesday 25 May 2022, 10am to 11am, UK time, online.

Speaker: Dr Jennifer Davis, University of Cambridge

Chair: Dr Elena Cooper, CREATe

Title: Trade marks and truth telling: sweated labour and the marking of goods in Britain, 1860-1920

Abstract: A registered trade mark acts as an indication of origin for goods but tells us nothing specific about the circumstances under which they originated. This limitation was not inevitable. When trade marks became objects of registration in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century the amount of information they should convey was hotly contested as was the information to be placed upon goods under laws against deceptive marketing.  These debates involved manufacturers, retailers, warehousemen, exporters, opponents of immigration and representatives of labour.  The latter were aware that, depending on the debate’s outcome, the strength of labour’s position in the workplace might be consolidated or undermined.     This talk looks at developments in production and consumption which ensured that laws regulating trade marks and trade descriptions became of importance to labour.  It then looks at the development of the law.  It argues that critics understood the use of trade marks and trade descriptions, when placed on goods, as concealing a critical disjunction between the public understanding of their origin and the actual manner and location of their production in Britain and abroad: a disjunction which came at the expense of labour.  An example of this concern, the debate over the ‘sweated’ trades in the late nineteenth century, will be considered.  Finally, the talk examines labour’s suggested remedies, and ask why they were unsuccessful.

Biography: Dr Jennifer Davis is an historian and a lawyer.  She is a member of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge and an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.  She has published widely in the area of 19^th century poverty, law breaking and law enforcement. Her publications include studies of immigration, policing and the magistracy in London.  She has also lectured and published in the area of intellectual property law with a particular interest in trade marks and unfair competition, viewed from an interdisciplinary perspective.  As well as publishing articles on contemporary trade mark law and unfair competition and their history, together with the linguist Alan Durant, she has published a number of articles on the intersection between trade mark law and linguistics.  They are currently working on a book, Key Words in Intellectual Property Law, for CUP. With Jane Ginsburg and Lionel Bently she has edited two books which approach copyright and trade marks from an interdisciplinary perspective.