Top Section 9 Filers

So far in 2021 the European Data Protection Board is the top filer of Canadian Section 9 Prohibited/Official Mark applications, with 37 such filings.

Section 9(1) of the Trademarks Act sets out different types of so-called prohibited/official marks, as explained in the Section 9 Marks post.  As of 06-Sep-2021 there are 31,447 Section 9 marks on the Canadian trademarks register.  28,841 (91.7%) of those marks are currently active—the remaining 2,606 (8.3%) are inactive (i.e. deemed never filed, refused, withdrawn, etc.).

The chart below shows the annual filing breakdown of Section 9 marks¹:

Section 9 filings break down by sub-section as follows:

The four tables below (click any table to enlarge it) list the:

• All Time Top 20 Section 9 Filers
• Top 20 Section 9 Filers between 01-Jan-2010 and 16-Jun-2019 (pre-CIF)
• Top 20 Section 9 Filers between 17-Jun-2019 and 06-Sep-2021 (post-CIF)
• Top 20 Section 9 Filers in 2021 (01-Jan-2021 through 06-Sep-2021)

Note that I have not disambiguated the results.  For example, in the first table, the 2nd and 6th ranked Western Canada Lottery Corporation / Western Canada Lottery Corporation (WCLC) entries could be combined into a single 1st-ranked entry representing 424 + 304 = 728 section 9 filings, assuming that both entries pertain to the same entity.  Two separate entries appear in the table because the responsible authority’s name is presented differently: as “Western Canada Lottery Corporation” in 424 filings and as “Western Canada Lottery Corporation (WCLC)” in another 304 filings.  Such issues must be kept in mind in working with CIPO’s trademark .xml data.

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1 You may wonder why the chart shows some Section 9 filings in 1939.  Official/prohibited marks were introduced by Section 14 of the Unfair Competition Act (1932) 22-23 George V c. 38—the predecessor to Section 9 of the current statute.   However, the charted 1939 filings were made pursuant to sub-sections of Section 9 which were not enacted for decades after the current statute took effect in 1954.  As one example, see application no. 970634 which was purportedly filed on 17-June-1939 and published in the Trademarks Journal some 58 years later (!) on 16-July-1997.  I will address this anomaly (and others) in a future post.^↩