The germination of trademarks can be traced back to ancient times, until the early modern business activities, the role of trademarks is still not prominent. After the Industrial Revolution, products were produced in large quantities on an industrial scale, increasing the variety of products and transmitting them to all parts of the world along the rail and sea. The role of trademarks in indicating the origin of goods has also begun to become more prominent. As a result, the management of trademarks gradually developed.
Regarding the origin of trademarks, there is no special historical work to argue, people can only speculate and infer from archaeological and relevant historical documents, and scholars' statements are also very inconsistent.
Some scholars believe that the trademark originates from the brand of the Spanish nomadic tribe livestock that distinguishes the different owners.
Located in the Caves of Altamira in northern Spain, at least 12,000 years ago in the late Paleolithic period, the original graphic markers of human beings
Indian stone seals, excavated at the Halapa site in the Indus Valley, date back 4,500 years, are likely used to identify trade goods
Stone seals that are very similar to the "Indian Stone Seal" have been unearthed in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Central Asia
Some scholars believe that the early use and protection of trademarks was based on government regulation.
In 1266, England enacted the first law of compulsory marking for bakers, and the government forced bakers to mark their marks on the bread they made and sold.
In 1300, King Edward I of England decreed that all gold plates were generally marked with three different types of marks before they were sold: the goldsmith's personal mark, the identification mark, and the guild mark.
In 1633, King Charles I of England issued a decree "Prohibition of Deception and Cajoling in the Wool Textile Industry", which specifically required that textile merchants should use marks on their products, and that they should not be changed arbitrarily, and that they should not use marks that were the same as those already used by others.
King Charles I of England
Trademark protection in the modern sense was first seen in France. In 1803, counterfeiting trademarks was convicted of forging documents without permission. In 1804, the French Napoleonic Code, the French Civil Code, for the first time affirmed that trademarks are protected by law as intangible property like other property rights, creating a modern trademark legal system.
In 1857, the French Enactment Law on the Manufacture of Marks and Trademarks with the Principle of Use and the Principle of Non-Examination as the Content was the world's earliest trademark law, and the United Kingdom promulgated the world's first relatively complete "Commodity Marking Law" in 1862.
Starting from the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property concluded in 1883, trademarks were included in the scope of protection of multilateral international conventions, marking the establishment of a modern trademark system.
The 1851 London World Expo played a considerable role in the development of trademark law, greatly expanding the scope of trademark dissemination and laying the groundwork for the formulation of trademark laws in various countries in the world. At the same time, another significant contribution of the London Expo to trademark law was the provision of a reference for the "classification of goods"
Foreign trademark registration system is established in modern times, such as the United Kingdom, the earliest registered trademark in 1875 until now is the Bass red triangle pattern trademark on beer, the French Impressionist painter Eduard Manet's last painting "Welfare Beger's Bar" has two bottles of Bass beer figure (this oil painting is in the collection of the Scottaud School of Art in London, England)