How current is the data?

If you work with CIPO’s trademark .xml data—or with CIPO’s online trademark database—you may encounter situations in which you need to know the exact date of the most recent event details represented in the data—or in the online database.

For example, you may be watching a particular application or registration with a view to initiating (or settling) opposition or cancellation proceedings contingent upon the taking of a particular step by the applicant, registrant or CIPO.  Or you may be watching a particular registration that is about to expire to see if CIPO has accepted a NICE classification submission to facilitate renewal of the registration in respect of certain NICE classes.

In such situations it is prudent to bear in mind that the most recent events represented in the data may be up to 8 days old.

A first approximation can be obtained by opening CIPO’s online trademark database in your browser, whereupon you will see something like this (click to enlarge the image):

The red-encircled statement “The database was last updated on: 2021-03-10” changes weekly, on Wednesday, as indicated at the beginning of CIPO’s help dialog for the online database:

So, if you are working with the online database when the statement “The database was last updated on: 2021-03-10” appears as above, you can be confident that the results you obtain will reflect events that occurred on or before Wednesday, 10 March 2021, right?  Wrong!  In fact, the results you obtain will reflect events that occurred on or before Monday, 8 March 2021, i.e. 2 days before the date stipulated in the above statement and possibly up to 8 days before the date on which you view the online database.  The same constraint applies to the .xml data.

For certain types of dates, e.g. application filing dates, you can determine the exact date of the most current information represented in the online database by doing a simple search as follows.  Choose Application number as your search field and put an asterisk (*) in the search box as shown on the right (click to enlarge the image).  

Then, after expanding Additional Search Options, expand Action Dates; choose “Filed" in the Action dropdown; change the “From” date to 03/09/2021; then click the Add Date button.  This yields the Additional Search Options setup shown on the right (click to enlarge the image).

Finally, click the Search button and you will get “Results found: 0” as shown on the right (click to enlarge the image).  Specifically, if you do the foregoing search any time before the Wednesday following the Wednesday on which the database is updated (in this example, at any time before Wednesday, 17 March 2021) you will find that the database contains nothing pertaining to applications filed on or after Tuesday, 9 March 2021.

If you repeat the same simple search, but change the “From” date to 03/08/2021, you will discover that 136 applications were filed on Monday, 8 March 2021, as shown on the right.  More importantly, taken together, the results of these two simple searches reveal that the online database contains details of applications filed on or before Monday, 8 March 2021 but no details of applications filed after that date.

However that just tells us about new application filings.  If you repeat the same simple searches for each of the other types of dates that can be selected in the Action dropdown (i.e. Advertisement date, Registration date, International Registration date, Registration Expiry date and Inactivated date) you will get “Results found: 0” relative to dates after Monday, 8 March 2021 for the International Registration date category, but you will get non-zero results for each of the other categories.  That is because the Advertisement, Registration Expiry and Inactivated dates are predetermined and loaded into the dataset in advance.  Furthermore, the results obtained for the Registration date category will be found to pertain only to Section 9 official marks for which the final step in the protection process is advertisement in the Trademarks Journal, not registration per se.

But what about the many other dates that CIPO does not expose for search purposes via the online database?  For example, does the database contain any information pertaining to prosecution, opposition or cancellation proceeding events that happened on either Tuesday, 9 March 2021 or Wednesday, 10 March 2021 when the statement “The database was last updated on: 2021-03-10” appears as above?  The answer is “No”.  To verify that, it is necessary to turn to CIPO’s trademark .xml data.

As explained in my post titled The Data, each week CIPO releases roughly 10 to 20 thousand new or updated trademark .xml files.  The image on the right shows a few of the more recent weekly update files that CIPO made available for download via the trademarks section of the IP Horizons site as of Wednesday, 10 March 2021.  Notice the column headed “Date of production...” and the date “2021-03-09” of the most recent downloadable file, which is named WEEKLY_2021-03-09_00-04-35.zip.  If the file was produced (i.e. created) on Tuesday, 9 March 2021 it clearly won’t contain anything pertaining to events occurring on or after Wednesday, 10 March 2021.  Downloading and unzipping that file yields 11,995 .xml files which I have processed into my database as generally explained in my XML shredding post.  Having done that, I can execute some simple queries to determine the date of the most recent prosecution, opposition or cancellation proceeding events represented in CIPO’s .xml data.

Specifically:

• No prosecution events dated Tuesday, 9 March 2021 or later are represented in the data, with the exception of “advertised” or “renewed” dates which are predetermined as mentioned above.  The same query reveals 1,730 prosecution events dated Monday, 8 March 2021.
• No opposition proceeding events dated Tuesday, 9 March 2021 or later are represented in the data, with the exception of predetermined future deadline type events (e.g. “Deadline to File C/S”, “Deadline to File Applicant’s Evidence”, etc.).  The same query reveals 17 opposition proceeding events dated Monday, 8 March 2021.
• No cancellation proceeding (i.e. Section 45) events dated Tuesday, 9 March 2021 or later are represented in the data, with the exception of predetermined future deadline type events (e.g. “Oral Hearing Scheduled”, etc.).  The same query reveals 22 cancellation proceeding events dated Monday, 8 March 2021.

So when you see a statement like “The database was last updated: 2021-03-10” on CIPO’s online database, you should interpret it as though it read “The database was last updated on: 2021-03-10 and contains data respecting events which occurred on or before 2021-03-08.”  If you are working with CIPO’s trademark .xml data (or with the online database) on Tuesday, 16 March 2021 that 8-day gap may matter.