This chapter considers the trade mark system established towards the end of the nineteenth century and already taking on many of its modern characteristics in the period up to World War I. It points out how Anglo-American and Australian law was shaped by a modern idea of the individual’s power and desire to establish, maintain and control personal identity, drawing on the world of signs. In part, this can be seen in the liberty allowed for registration of personalised signs that traders might wish to adopt and use to express themselves. But, there was another aspect, more focussed on the domain of resistance to labels, that was evident in the statutory restraints allowed on registration of personal names and images inter alia through specific provisions in the US and the Australian Trade Marks Acts of 1905. The latter restraints and their afterlives are the particular concern of this contribution to the volume.