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Trademarks and content stamps



 
 
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  #1  
Old July 10th 03, 06:10 AM
Mars
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Default Trademarks and content stamps

Would anyone know when the law was passed that the metal content had
to be stamped on each piece of jewelry made ? 20's ? 30's ? 40's?
please respond to

Thanks

Frank
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  #2  
Old July 10th 03, 06:34 AM
Peter W. Rowe
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On Wed, 09 Jul 2003 22:10:30 -0700, in rec.crafts.jewelry Mars
wrote:

Would anyone know when the law was passed that the metal content had
to be stamped on each piece of jewelry made ? 20's ? 30's ? 40's?
please respond to

Thanks

Frank


If, as your email address suggests, you're looking for Canadian law, then I
can't help you.

But in the U.S., the first one I have quotes from is from 1906. There may have
been earlier acts that affected this as well, the the 1906 law (passed in 1907)
is sometimes called the original U.S. stamping Act. That law stated that if you
stamp a piece of jewelery gold that is made of gold, then you also have to stamp
it with the karat as well. The law specified other stuff too, like
tolerances.

An amendment to it in 1962 required that anything stamped to indicate gold or
silver content had to also have a tradmark, or the name of the firm or person
responsible for the claim.

In November 1970, an ammendment was added which allowed manufacturers and
associations to take unscrupulous violators of the laws to courts, but the
stamping requirements remained the same until 1976, when what I think is the
last major revision of the U.S. stamping law that was passed. It reduces the
tolerances for indicated karat such that items could not assay more than .003
parts per thousand less than marked, or if the item contains solder, it could
not, if assayed as a whole, be less than .007 parts per thousand of the marked
karat. The previous law had allowed a full half karat tolerance.

The 1976 law gave manufacturers five years to comply, allowing already
manufactured goods to be sold off with the old standards. The result was the
emergence of stamps that added the letter P, indicating "plumb", to the kt mark,
to distinguish the new alloys from the old. Without the P, 14K would actually
be 13.5K, while with it, it was pretty much plumb 14K. The P in the stamps is
no longer in such common usage, since about the only old 13.5 kt stuff floating
around is clearly not new merchandise any more.

Note that the law does NOT actually require a karat stamp at all. It is legal
to sell jewelery with no stamps whatsoever, so long as you're also not
representing it as gold. It only needs to be karat stamped if you're
representing it as such. Even then, it's legal to mark it with means other than
an actual stamp, such as tags, if that's appropriate to the item. The law
simply states that if you mark it gold, you have to also indicate the quality,
and not diviate lower than that standard by the stated tolerances, and also that
if you mark it gold or silver, then you also have to mark it with a trademark or
proper identifier, and the trademark stamps and quality stamps must be by
similar means (both stamps, for example) and equally visible..

Also, though I'm not certain of this, these are U.S. federal laws. Usually,
such laws apply only when items are being sold in interstate commerce. I might
be wrong about this, but I suspect that an individual artist selling only
locally, not shipping across state lines, etc, might be able to escape
presecution if they violated such laws, since the FTC usually can only become
involved if interstate commerce is involved. Of course, individual states may
well also have such laws, but this would vary state by state.

the above info is taken from the closest book I have at hand with that info,
which happens to be one of Murrey Bovin's fine books. This one is a 1977
edition, so if there are mre recent additions to the laws, i don't have the
exact quotes/dates in front of me. But frankly, I don't recall any more recent
additions.

peter


 




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