Court Opinion

ID: 9705607
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 01:13:39.204626+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:12.919652
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Bell :
Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation entered into a so-called Fair Trade contract with a retail dealer in Scranton, Erie, Pittston and Clearfield, Pa. Under each contract the retail dealer agreed to sell the corporation’s products at certain stipulated prices. Defendant, a retail dealer in Chester, Pa., sold plaintiff’s products at a price lower than the stipulated prices above mentioned. There was no contract between plaintiff and defendant, nor was there any Fair Trade contract between plaintiff and any retail dealer or other person in any territory or area in which there was trade competition between defendant and any dealer who had contracted with plaintiff. This was not a case of a loss leader, or of price cutting at less than cost.
The Trade-Marks, Trade-Names and Labels Act of June 5, 1935,* as amended, commonly but mistakenly called the Fair Trade Act, was passed to prohibit unfair competition. In the instant case there was not only no unfair competition — there was no competition. “Competition exists only where both parties are soliciting purchases of similar goods in the same territory and at the same time.”: Silbert v. Kerstein, 318 Mass. 476 (1945). In Calvert Distillers Corp. v. Nussbaum Liquor Store, 166 Misc. 342, 2 N.Y.S. 320 (1938) the Court, in discussing the New York Fair Trade Act said (page 325) : “Implicit in the statute is the require*233ment that the prices fixed for resale by retailers be uniform in any one competitive area.”
In my judgment, the so-called Fair Trade Act does not and was never intended by the Legislature to apply to anything except unfair competition in trade-marloed goods in the same territory. The unreasonableness and untenability of the majority’s interpretation of this statute is more clearly apparent when one realizes that they would logically and of necessity hold that if one retail dealer in Erie, Pa. had a so-called Fair Trade contract with the plaintiff, it would bind every dealer in Philadelphia as well as every dealer throughout the entire State. Such an absurdity was never intended by the Legislature. For this reason I would reverse the decree of the lower Court which granted an injunction against defendant.

 P.L. 266, §§1, 2, 73 PS §§7, 8.