Top 20 Design Marks

The previous post looked at Canada’s Top 20 Word Marks.  That may have left you wondering about top design marks.

Top 20 Word Marks

A client contacts you, enthused about a new mark that you must protect forthwith.  After the big reveal you groan inwardly—it’s another laudatory mark.

Canada’s 21st Century Filings & Applicants

402,768 applicants have filed a total of 1,104,036 Canadian trademark applications so far this century, i.e. between 01-January-2000 and 26-July-2021.  25% of those filings were made by less than 1% of those applicants.

1.8 Million Marks and Counting

CIPO’s trademark data update for the week ending 12-July-2021 increased the number of marks on the Canadian trademarks register to 1,800,083.

The Annual Opposition Rate

As a follow-up to Counting Opposition Cases, this post presents some charts showing opposition activity over the past 25 years.

Tracking Expedited Examination

CIPO does not update its trademark .xml data to flag instances in which the examination process is informally expedited.  However the data can be mined to detect such instances, e.g. filing-to-examination in 7 days; filing-to-approval in 17 days; as in the examples below.

Counting Opposition Cases

How many opposition cases has CIPO dealt with over the years?  The answer depends on the way in which you count oppositions and also depends on what qualifies as an “opposition”.

The Perils of Popularity

The Chartered Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys has published a brief article titled “The Perils of Popularity” in which I discuss CIPO’s backlog of unexamined trademark applications.  See page 21 of the July/August 2021 issue of CITMA Review (here).

Status Update 2-Years Post-CIF

This post examines the current status (as of 21 June 2021—CIPO’s most recent data refresh) of the applications CIPO has received since coming into force (CIF) of the 17 June 2019 amendments to the Trademarks Act, RSC 1985 c. T-13 (TMA).

Doubtful Cases

Section 37(3) of the Trademarks Act, R.S.C., 1985, c. T-13 (TMA) requires the Registrar to notify the owner of a registered trademark of the advertisement of a pending application if the Registrar “is in doubt whether the trademark claimed in the application is registrable” over the registered mark.  The idea is presumably that inter partes opposition proceedings between the registrant and applicant are better suited to resolving such doubt than ex parte examination proceedings.

Standardization Marks

What do the words Alice, Cinderella, Donald Duck, Dopey, Dumbo, Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Pluto, Seven Dwarfs and Snow White have in common, besides the fact that they are Disney characters?  Those words are all standardization marks originally protected pursuant to the Unfair Competition Act (1932) 22-23 George V c. 38; RSC 1952 c. 274.  They all remain on the current Canadian trademark register—in the standardization mark category—which may be unfamiliar to some practitioners.

Some Vienna Statistics

This post takes a brief look at some statistical metrics for CIPO’s Vienna Classifications data.

A geographical supranational view of CIPO’s data

This post presents an overview of CIPO’s trademark .xml data from a continental and sub-continental regional standpoint.

Canada’s Madrid Submarines

If you do a “knock-out” search of CIPO’s online trademark database you should beware that a conflicting priority-claiming application for an identical mark could be filed up to six months after the date of your search.  Canada’s accession to the Madrid Protocol presents a new issue: a conflicting priority-claiming Madrid “submarine” application for an identical mark could surface in CIPO’s database over 1½ years after the date of your search!

CIPO’s Top 10 Nice Classes

In a 10 May 2021 email notification, CIPO announced a gradual expansion of its Goods and Services Manual “beginning with the top ten Nice classes filed within the last ten years”.  This post looks at top 10 Nice classes in various ways.