“A Name Which to Them is Sacred”: Quakers and Religious Trademarks in American Enterprise
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Andrew Ventimiglia
Andrew Ventimiglia is an Assistant Professor of Mass Media with a specialization in media law and ethics in the School of Communication at Illinois State University. His research focuses on the history and cultural effects of intellectual property law, including a focus on the intersection of religion and intellectual property law in the American spiritual marketplace. His first book
Copyrighting God: Ownership of the Sacred in American Religion was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.
Abstract
This article examines disputes surrounding the ownership and appropriation of the name “Quaker” in American enterprise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I focus specifically on efforts by the Society of Friends – colloquially known as the Quakers – to prohibit the use of the name of any religious church, denomination, society, or association in commerce, thereby rendering religious trademarks unregistrable. By exploring disputes around the Quaker name, I argue that the Society of Friends strategically appropriated terminology provided by trademark law (product origin, goodwill, distinctiveness) to claim ownership in the Quaker name while simultaneously arguing that religious names were sacred and thus could not be owned as a form of intellectual property. This historical debate provides insights to crucial questions about the spectral operation of trademark law in the United States. For instance, how are the taxonomies and logics of trademark law ‘possessed’ or spectrally animated by other pre-existing cultural/theological dimensions of ownership? Conversely, how does trademark law then reconstitute pre-existing logics around naming within religious organizations, for instance by providing new frames (the name as defense for consumer confusion or as guarantor of divine source) for understanding American religious practice?
About the author
Andrew Ventimiglia is an Assistant Professor of Mass Media with a specialization in media law and ethics in the School of Communication at Illinois State University. His research focuses on the history and cultural effects of intellectual property law, including a focus on the intersection of religion and intellectual property law in the American spiritual marketplace. His first book Copyrighting God: Ownership of the Sacred in American Religion was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.
© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Introduction to the ‘The Spectral Nature of Intellectual Property’ Pólemos
- Focus
- The Spectre of the Machine: Finding Space for Empirical Inventions in Patent Law
- Copyright, Ghosts, Information
- Impossible Realities and Intellectual Property: Specters of Value in Amie Siegel’s Provenance
- The Emergence of Yoga-as-Property in American Law: The Haunting Presence of Commercial Logics from Swami Vivekananda to Bikram’s Hot Yoga
- Spectres of Intellectual Property in the Soviet Union: The Development and Recognition of the Inventor’s Certificate
- “A Name Which to Them is Sacred”: Quakers and Religious Trademarks in American Enterprise
- Schrödinger’s Rose: Indeterminacy and Contingent Futures in the Plant Variety Rights System of Aotearoa New Zealand
- Non-singular Logics of Intellectual Property in Biomedical Innovation
- Spectral Shadows in Scientific Practice: Unveiling the Haunting Effects of Authorship and Scientific Capital Accumulation
- Research
- Domination and Submission. From the Idea of ‘Legal Personality’ Back to the Metaphor of the ‘Mask’
- “The Whore That Lost Everything”: The Tyranny of Law and the Queer Feminisation of Soft Power as Explored in Black Sails
- Book Review
- Ian Ward: The Trials of Charles I
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Introduction to the ‘The Spectral Nature of Intellectual Property’ Pólemos
- Focus
- The Spectre of the Machine: Finding Space for Empirical Inventions in Patent Law
- Copyright, Ghosts, Information
- Impossible Realities and Intellectual Property: Specters of Value in Amie Siegel’s Provenance
- The Emergence of Yoga-as-Property in American Law: The Haunting Presence of Commercial Logics from Swami Vivekananda to Bikram’s Hot Yoga
- Spectres of Intellectual Property in the Soviet Union: The Development and Recognition of the Inventor’s Certificate
- “A Name Which to Them is Sacred”: Quakers and Religious Trademarks in American Enterprise
- Schrödinger’s Rose: Indeterminacy and Contingent Futures in the Plant Variety Rights System of Aotearoa New Zealand
- Non-singular Logics of Intellectual Property in Biomedical Innovation
- Spectral Shadows in Scientific Practice: Unveiling the Haunting Effects of Authorship and Scientific Capital Accumulation
- Research
- Domination and Submission. From the Idea of ‘Legal Personality’ Back to the Metaphor of the ‘Mask’
- “The Whore That Lost Everything”: The Tyranny of Law and the Queer Feminisation of Soft Power as Explored in Black Sails
- Book Review
- Ian Ward: The Trials of Charles I
