Frazer v. Frazer Lubricator Co.

Citations

• 121 Ill. 147
• 13 N.E. 639

Syllabus

<p>1. Trade-mark—consisting of one’s own name—and as the subject of sale and transfer, and the rights acquired thereby. While it is true, as a general proposition, that one can not, by using his own name as a trade mark, deprive another having the same name from using it in conducting his own business, yet the latter can not, under cover of using his own name, be permitted to resort to any device or artifice by which the public will be led to purchase his goods or manufactured articles, under the belief that they are those of the former.</p> <p>2. A party has the right to use his own name in conducting his business, either by himself or in connection with others, if done in a proper and legitimate way; and this right is a valuable one, especially when he is the discoverer of a valuable article of trade then being manufactured, and sold on the market. This right, like most other property rights, is the subject of sale and transfer.</p> <p>3. Where a party sells out an established business, and with it his own name, to be used in connection with such business, his vendees Will acquire a right to the use of the name, and he can not afterward resume it in carrying on the same business.</p> <p>4. This is on the old principle that a title based on a sale for a valuable consideration, under a contract fairly entered into between parties sui juris, will be upheld and enforced, in equity as well as at law. After the sale of the right to use a party’s name in the manufacture and sale of an article, a court of equity will enjoin him from resuming its use in the same business.</p> <p>5. The patentee of a rosin oil used in manufacturing the inventor’s axle grease, known as “Frazer’s Axle Grease,” sold all his interest under his patent, and conferred on his grantees and their “successors,” the right to use his name, “so far as it might be necessary to use it, as a trade-mark, or as indicating the material or product which had theretofore been manufactured under said letters paten