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Information in the Mark and the Marketplace: A Multivocal Account

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Paul Duguid
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Abstract

Trademark theory implicitly assumes that laws favoring the interests of the producer will inevitably serve the interests of the consumer. Such a claim justifies the way that trademark law privileges the voice of the producer in the marketplace. Historical work has tended to endorse this view, explaining the development of trademarks and trademark law in terms of the information needed for consumers in the modern marketplace. Taking both a historical and “informational” perspective, this essay argues that the producer’s and the consumer’s interests do not so easily align. It speculates that a less varnished history of the mark shows more of a struggle between producers, who seek to have their voice heard without dissent, and consumers, who often want to find alternative yet informed voices to endorse or qualify the information provided by the mark. This alternative view would help explain why, as the paper seeks to show, despite conventional evolutionary narratives, the history of trademarking in the United States is in fact far from linear.

Type
Articles
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 1 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2013. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

I am extremely grateful to the Hagley Museum and Library and to Roger Horowitz for the invitation to present a talk on which this paper is based. I am also grateful to Philip Scranton and David Suisman for very helpful comments on that talk; to Deven Desai, patient with both my prose and my limited legal understanding; and to anonymous reviewers for Enterprise & Society, who with the care and diligence they showed helped to improve not only this paper but, I suspect, also my future reviewing.

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