Vice-Chancellor Bacon held this day week that the name of
a paper cannot be borrowed for a new enterprise with the mere ad- dition of the word "New" before it. Thus the Era was granted an injunction against a proprietor who proposed to call his paper the New Era, especially as there was other evidence that he wished to get a part of the advantage of the reputation for in- formation of a particular kind which the Era had obtained. On appeal, however, the Court, including Lord Justices James, Baggallay, Bramwell, and Brett, held that the real question was whether what appeared on the front of a paper was calculated to deceive an ordinary purchaser into the belief that the article sold by him was an article belonging to somebody else. And as the New Era is a paper of a different size and very different appear- ance from the Era—having, for instance, a picture on its front page, which the Era has not—Vice-Chancellor Bacon's order was dismissed. The language used, however, shows that the legality of such closely approximating titles depends on there being no real probability of confusion in the public mind,—no fair pre- sumption that there would be such confusion. The judgment does not imply that there is any danger of legalising a whole series of duplicate journals, which the public would suppose to be merely new series of those with which they were familiar. Indeed, if the addition of the word "New," without any other visible and conspicuous difference, transformed the title, so would the addition of the word "Old," and so we might get triplicate journals in the same form, differing only in a mono- syllable, more or less.
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