Backstory: An unlikely pair?
Keith Havelock looks back at how trade mark and patent rights came to be the responsibility of the same office.
Many would consider trade marks and patents to be chalk and cheese, so how did it come about that the Trade Marks Registry in the UK became part of The Patent Office?
The current head of the UK IPO, Tim Moss, who is by definition also the Registrar of Trade Marks in the UK, was appointed to his present position in 2017, having previously been head of the UK Companies Registry since 2012.
This may of itself be indicative of an affinity between the respective offices. Both are executive agencies of the UK’s Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
But can any similar affinity be deduced between trade mark and patent rights, apart from their both being monopolies in the gift of the state?
Amalgamation
By the mid-19th century, the administration of patent rights had become the responsibility of the Commissioners of Patents, created by the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1852.
This meant that responsibility for the day-to-day running of The Patent Office sat with the Clerk to the Commissioners.
In 1875, it was announced that “the offices for the registration of Designs and Trade Marks, having been amalgamated with The Patent Office, Mr Bennet Woodcroft FRS, Clerk to the Commissioners for Patents, has been appointed Registrar of Designs.
No formal appointment in connection with the Registration of Trade Marks has yet been made”.
At this time, no office for the registration of trade marks had been established, and although amalgamation with The Patent Office was in the opinion of some contemporary commentators a “reasonable inference”, the amalgamation was not essential.
The office of Registrar of Trade Marks could have been combined with that of the Registrar of Companies, for example, and when the new Registry did eventually open, it was initially distinct from The Patent Office.
Inconspicuous entrance
The Trade Marks Registration Act 1875 mandated the establishment a Trade Marks Registry no later than 1st January 1876. In practice, the authorities were hard-pressed to meet this deadline.
Establishing a classification system for goods for registration purposes caused great difficulty, and a final version, based on the system of classification that had been used for the Great Exhibition of 1851, was only settled upon in the December immediately prior to the January 1876 date.
Thus, on 29th December 1875, it was inconspicuously announced at the bottom of a column in The Times, that “the Trade Mark Registry Office will be open on 1st January in Quality Court, 47 Chancery Lane. Mr [Henry] Reader Lack of the Board of Trade is appointed Registrar”.
Mr Reader Lack, later Sir, had apparently accepted the position only on condition that his salary would be £1,500 per annum, which was at the time (with a few exceptions) the highest remuneration in public service.
And so it was that the UK Trade Marks Registry, together with the office of Registrar, became, following something of a last-minute scramble, formally associated with and ultimately a formal division of The Patent Office, later the UK IPO.
With acknowledgements to R.L. Moorby et al, A Century of Trade Marks 1876 - 1976 (London: HMSO, 1976) and the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, January 1976.
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