Charles Evans Hughes

“ That Puerto Rico makes its rule applicable to its own citizens who may possess such foreign marks cannot avail to purge the discrimination of its hostility to the treaty. The same reasoning, if admitted to sustain this particular discrimination, would justify as against the treaty a local statute denying the right to use in Puerto Rico any foreign trade mark in any circumstances.
The exigencies of local trade and manufacture which prompted the enactment of the state cannot save it, as the United States in exercising its treaty making power dominates local policy. ”

“ In this view, the contention that a ratifying State, on due registration of a foreign mark in accordance with the treaty, is not bound to protect the owner in the use of that mark provided it refuses that protection to its own nationals necessarily fails. Undoubtedly the Contracting States are bound respectively to give to the nationals of the other Contracting States the same rights and remedies that are extended to their own nationals. ”

“ As to these trade marks and labels, the prohibition does not rest on lack of proper registration under the local law. Petitioner's trade marks have been duly registered in the United States and Puerto Rico. Nor does the prohibition of use proceed on the ground that the trade marks, as such, are invalid. The Cuban corporation which licensed petitioner to manufacture and sell Bacardi products and to use Bacardi trade marks had for many years sold its rum in Puerto Rico, although the rum was not manufactured there. There is no question of deception or unfair methods of competition. ”