Archive for February, 2010
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Saturday, February 6th, 2010
With the clock ticking towards the start of the Vancouver Olympic Winter 2010 Games next Friday, some athletes have already arrived in the City and moved into the Olympic Athletes’ Village. Amongst these are members of the Australian Olympic Team, who have already found themselves in some in hot water with the International Olympic Committee (“IOC’). According to a recent story, team members have hung a 50-metre flag, depicting a boxing kangaroo, on the side of one of the housing complexes in the Olympic Village.
The IOC had apparently ordered the flag removed as the boxing kangaroo image is a registered trademark of the Australian Olympic Committee. The IOC Rules control display of registered trademarks.
The Australian Olympic Team had suggested that they may not take the flag down without a fight, as the boxing kangaroo is apparently known as the national personification of Australia.
The IOC has now apparently agreed to let the Australian Olympic Team continue to fly the flag. In the future, the Australian Olympic Committee will need to register the flag with the IOC if the flag is to be used at Olympics.
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Proposed Practice Notices: Professional Designations and Abbreviations, Acronyms and Initials
Friday, February 5th, 2010
The Canadian Intellectual Property Office has initiated two short consultations (January 29 to February 28, 2010) for proposed Practice Notices regarding section 12(1)(b) of the Trade-marks Act. Section 12(1)(b) provides that “a trademark is registrable if it is not, whether depicted, written or sounded, either clearly descriptive or deceptively misdescriptive in the English or French language of the character or quality of the wares or services in association with which it is used or proposed to be used or of the conditions of or the persons employed in their production or of their place of origin”. The two proposed Practice Notices address the application of 12(1)(b) to professional designations and to abbreviations, acronyms and initials.
If research discloses that an applied for trademark consists of a professional designation, the examiner will apply a first impression test to determine whether a consumer would assume the goods and services are produced by a professional with a designation similar to the applied-for trademark and if so, the trademark will be unregistrable, being clearly descriptive of the persons employed in the production of the wares and services. The addition of an abbreviation, acronym or initial to the professional designation will not make the trademark registrable.
A trademark that consists of or contains an abbreviation, acronym or initial will be considered unregistrable if considered as a whole and if as a matter of first impression the abbreviation, acronym or initial is clearly descriptive or deceptively misdescriptive of the wares and services. Moreover, the addition of an abbreviation, acronym or initial to a clearly descriptive word or phrase will not render it registrable as a trademark.
The changes arise in light of a recent Federal Court decision, College of Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners and Acupuncturists of British Columbia v. Council of Nature Medicine College of Canada, that considered some 39 trademark applications and registrations containing abbreviations, acronyms and initials and allegedly confusing with certain professional designations.
Posted in Case Law, Protection & Enforcement, Registration | No Comments »