Statutes
| Date | 01 March 1954 |
| Published date | 01 March 1954 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1954.tb00261.x |
STATUTES
MERCHANDISE
MARKS
ACT, 1958
THE
signal inadequacy of the common law relating
to
“
puff
”
and
to misrepresentation, with its restricted definitions and remedies,
has resulted in important developments, both legal and extra-legal,
against the unscrupulous
or
over-ingenious use by traders and
manufacturers of false
or
misleading descriptions of commodities.
Thus, there have grown up various organisations, whose work,
though often in different fields, has the common end
of
establishing
acceptable standards
of
quality and
of
commercial integrity. There
is,
for
example, the British Standards Institution, whose primary
concern is with the standards and the craftsmanship
of
the manu-
facturer. There is the
Good
Housekeeping Institute, whose Seal,
attached to goods that pass appropriate tests,
‘‘
guarantees
”
to
the shopping public the quality and performance
of
those goods.
For
the would-be buyer of a second-hand car, there is the Auto-
mobile Association Advisory Service, which is prepared, through
expert reports to the buyer, to throw light
on
the darker places
of
a used car’s condition. Finally,
one
may mention the Retail
Trading Standards Association, which, financed by manufacturers
and traders, helps to enforce the existing law against the small
margin of
persons
whose lack of good faith in production and
trading methods tends to impair the good name of industry and
commerce in the domestic market, and the reputation of British
craftsmanship and fair dealing in the world
as
a whole.
For,
now, a very considerable body of statute law exists through
which Parliament has sought progressively to regulate, in particular,
the descriptive statements applied to the general range of com-
modities. Among these statutes are included especially, for the
present purpose, the Merchandise Marks Acts,
1887-1958,
which
regrettably are not yet in consolidated form.
The principal Act of 1887 was aimed
(inter
ah)
at trade
descriptions, false in a material respect and applied to any goods,
which relate
to
number, quantity, measure, gauge,
or
weight, to
the mode
of
manufacture
or
production,
or
to the material of which
the goods are composed. The
1887
Act did not deal with descrip-
tions that are simply misleading;
it
did not cover false descrip
tions of quality
or
performance;
it
was directed, by and large, at
descriptions as to the contents
or
composition of goods. There
was, for instance, a breach of the Act where a 84-gallon cask of
beer was described
on
the seller’s invoice as
a
“
barrel,’’ which, in
the beer trade, was
of
86
gallons capacity
(Budd
v.
hcas
[lSSl]
1
Q.B. 408);
or,
again, where American hams were sold and
1442
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