The increasing globalization of business brings with it a greater need for harmonization of trademark law and policy, central to which must be consistency in operation and application. Trademark owners doing business in diverse corners of the world, which may be governed by different legal systems, must have reasonable expectations of the scope of their trademark rights, as well as how and to what extent such rights will be enforced. As trademarks have evolved over the centuries from maker's marks to, in some cases, valuable marketable properties in their own right, both the public and private sectors must place greater emphasis on trademark protection

An examination of trademark laws and practices, as they exist today, must necessarily begin with a look at their origin and evolution. Trademarks originated as craftsmen's marks that artisans and others put on their goods to distinguish them from those of other artisans. Such marks have been found in antiquity, in many societies and civilizations, including Persia, Egypt and China, as well as Greece and Rome. The trademark in its modern sense began to evolve in medieval Europe, where the craftsmen's guilds developed a set of rules of usage governing maker's marks.

The brand names that one sees today are the present incarnation of the old maker's mark and often, after years of mass-marketing, have become so well-known that they acquire immense value themselves, not merely because of the value of the goods to which they are applied, but because of the goodwill created among consumers, with the resultant capacity to sell goods, and not just the goods to which they were originally applied and for which they became famous. Thus, today, trademarks themselves often become the equivalent of valuable goods, to be bought and sold. In recognition of this, in contrast to former times, trademarks may now be licensed and/or pledged as collateral.

The rise of the modern nation-state brought an expansion of competitive markets, covering the entire geographical region of a particular country. Governments adopted national trademark laws, intended to protect merchants and consumers in an entire nation. The most important feature of the national trademark law was a central, government-operated trademark registry that granted and established the scope of protection for a trademark.

Most of the world follows what is known as a civil law legal tradition, wherein laws are codified, and these codes are the actual source of the law. The great states of Asia, such as China and Japan, with long-established imperial traditions, follow this system. Civil law enjoys a distinguished tradition in the West as well. Roman civil law went with the lands conquered and nearly 1,800 years later with Napoleon and his conquests. The principal feature of trademark law in civil law countries is that rights arise through registration; that is, a trademark owner creates his exclusive right to the mark by having it set down on the government's roll of trademarks. In its strictest interpretation, there are no trademark rights without registration, and trademark pirates sometimes attempt to take advantage of this system to usurp a mark by winning the race to the register before the rightful owner. In practice today, however, many civil law countries allow the assertion of some trademark rights arising as a result of notoriety or distinctiveness acquired through use.

A few countries, however, chiefly those whose past is bound to England, follow the Anglo-Saxon common law tradition, whence law springs from common custom and usage, rather than through codification. In a strict common law trademark jurisdiction, trademark rights arise exclusively through use and the first user of a mark is first in right.

National trademark laws originally were enacted with the internal market in mind, with little or no thought given to foreign owners of trademarks or their rights. Indeed, as the national trademark law is a creature of sovereignty, it can function, and has functioned, as a powerful barrier to the free movement of goods over national borders. The laws in fact were originally intended to protect local merchants. This stands in contrast to today's theory and growing practice of the global market. Therefore, the use of a national trademark as a way to seal off various markets from one another as a form of trade protectionism has come under increasing international assault. A welcome trend in national trademark and international laws is increased protection for owners of foreign marks and the facilitation of international trade while maintaining the rights of trademark owners. This balance, however, has become increasingly complex as often the tenets of both theories have been, to some extent, in conflict.

With time and the increase of trade came attempts at harmonization of trademark laws, animated by economic and legal theory, and necessity, as countries have become more economically interdependent. Harmonization in the trademark context is desirable as it provides the required framework within which trademark owners can plan their international marketing strategies and be reasonably certain that their trademark rights with some additional legal effort on their part will be protected from country to country, and under multilateral treaties in large blocs of countries, in the same or similar ways.

Major trademark harmonization began with the Paris Convention in 1883 [2] and springing from that the Madrid Agreement of 1891, but has continued apace particularly in the last thirty years. Attempts at harmonization began bilaterally or regionally but more recently involve accession to multinational treaties providing for equal treatment of trademark owners, both foreign and domestic, under the national laws of all member states, actually conforming national laws to a generally accepted model, or adopting a system wherein trademark rights are granted in many countries through a single "international" registration.