October 2008

Bank Brands Going Bust?

By In Branding

A few weeks ago, we reported on the results of Interbrand’s 2008 Best Global Brands Survey, observing that the survey’s big losers, year-over-year, were financial services companies.

Of course, conditions in that industry have deteriorated significantly since then, so it is no surprise to see that Wachovia Corp. announced a $23.9 billion-dollar quarterly loss earlier today – the largest ever for a bank. And it also comes as no surprise to see that a write-down tied to a loss of goodwill made up a significant part of that loss.

What is notable, however, is the sheer size of that goodwill write-down: set at approximately $18.8 billion dollars, the write-down is more than three times that total value attributed to the Royal Bank of Canada when it was awarded the title of Canada’s most valuable brand in a 2007 Brand Finance study. Read more

Comparing Apple to Apple

By In Famous Marks, Protection & Enforcement

A report in the Globe and Mail tells the story of a small Vancouver Island school’s run in with tech heavyweight Apple Inc. in a dispute over the use of the school’s logo. Victoria School of Business and Technology (VSBT) reportedly adopted, three years ago, a logo featuring an apple with a silhouette of a mountain and the letters VSBT superimposed over top. VSBT’s apple has three bumps at the top of the apple, uses the colours blue, white and green quite prominently, and the apple is whole: no bite appears to have been taken out of it, as is the case with Apple Inc.’s well known logo. Apple’s logo, which is the subject of numerous registrations at the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) and which has been in use for over 30 years, features a bite taken out of the right side, two bumps at the top and no letters or other figures superimposed on it. In the marketplace, the logo is often depicted in an off-white colour; historically, it also often appeared in stripes and other colours as well.

As is often the case in these disputes, the media is portraying the issue as pitting VSBT’s “David” against Apple’s “Goliath.” The school’s website states that “VSBT is the leading provider of computer and business training for government ministries, corporation and individuals,” and indicates that training is available on both IBM-style personal computers as well as Apple’s MACINTOSH-brand computer systems. At the time of writing, we could locate no record in CIPO’s online trademark database of an application to register VSBT’s logo. Read more

CIPO’s Electronic Services Outage

By In Registration

For those of us who have embraced – and perhaps take for granted – the ease and convenience of filing documents online with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, the last two days have been trying ones. All systems of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, including the Trademark Database as well as the Online Filing Portal, were offline from late in the afternoon on September 30th, until earlier this morning, October 2nd. (Even now, the site seems a little shaky: pages load properly one minute and are unavailable the next.)

Recently released trade-mark statistics (which we blogged about a few months back) indicate that just over 45,000 applications were filed in the last twelve-month period for which stats are available. Of these, 90% were filed online. Crunching the numbers, that works out to be approximately 110 applications filed online, each day. Read more