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(91.7%) of those marks are currently active—the remaining 2,606 (8.3%) are inactive (i.e. deemed never filed, refused, withdrawn, etc.).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:
- 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)
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.↩