Ger­man Mer­ck bests US Mer­ck in UK copy­right tus­sle of Mer­ck v. Mer­ck

Be­fore Mer­ck and Mer­ck, there was on­ly Mer­ck.

A sin­gle com­pa­ny was found­ed as a drug­mak­er in the pre-Bis­mar­ck­ian days of an in­dus­tri­al­iz­ing Ger­many that, in 1891, de­cid­ed to launch an out­post in New York. It was a suc­cess­ful idea, launch­ing a small­pox vac­cine just 7 years lat­er, un­til World War I, when the US gov­ern­ment seized the US branch un­der the Trad­ing with the En­e­my Act, split­ting the glob­al cor­po­ra­tion in two and set­ting off a cen­tu­ry of in­ter­con­ti­nen­tal brand con­fu­sion.

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