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Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) today announced the approval of over 500 new or changed wares (goods) and services descriptions in its online Wares and Services Manual. This is the Manual that the CIPO Examiners refer to when reviewing applications for registration of trade-marks under the Trade-marks Act (the Act). Under Section 30(a) of the Act, an applicant is required to describe its claimed wares and services in ordinary commercial terms.
While certainly not exhaustive of all of the descriptions that an Examiner will consider to be acceptable, if an applicant’s wares and services can fit within the approved descriptions in the Manual, the processing of the application is likely to be much smoother.
The complete list of descriptions that were approved as of today can be accessed by typing the query “2011-09-07″ as a search term in the online Wares and Services Manual. These changes relate almost entirely to descriptions of wares, with only a few new service descriptions. Notable changes to the services descriptions include “online social networking services”, “real estate development” and “resort services”. This is somewhat disappointing in that rapid ongoing changes in online service delivery (e.g. social media, cloud computing, outsourcing and the like) and technology continue to far outpace changes to the Wares and Services Manual and challenges often arise in attempting to obtain approval for descriptions of new wares and services.
Practitioners continue to eagerly await the implementation of many new wares and services descriptions called for in the Trilateral Agreement – see our earlier post on this topic.
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CIPO Wares and Services Manual Contracts Again
Friday, May 6th, 2011
In an update to this story, this morning CIPO announced its discovery that a number of the entries it added to the Wares and Services Manual as a result of Canada’s participation in the trademark identification harmonization project conducted by the Trilateral Partners do not comply with Canadian trademark requirements.
As such, the over 12,000 Trilateral-approved entries that were added to the Wares and Services Manual yesterday are being removed today. CIPO has provided no official word on possible solutions, or a timetable for the (re)implementation of Trilateral-approved identification entries.
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Bigger! Better! Wares and Services Manual Expands
Thursday, May 5th, 2011
After a long wait, Canadian practitioners were delighted to learn this morning that CIPO has finally approved and activated more than 12,000 new entries in the Wares and Services Manual.
By way of background, in 2009 CIPO signed a memorandum of co-operation with the United States Patent and Trademarks Office, the Japan Patent Office and the Office for the Harmonization of the Internal Market (responsible for overseeing the CTM system). These entities – known as the Trilateral Partners – have worked in a loose association over the last few decades to promote and effect harmonization in their IP registration systems.
The Memorandum saw CIPO join the Trilateral Partners’ trademark identification project: the Partners maintain a list of identifications of goods and services that, if entered in an application for the registration of a trademark in any Partner country, will be accepted in that country.
As a condition of its accession to the Memorandum, Canada was permitted to assess the Trilateral list, and to reject a small percentage of identifications that it did not believe reflected Canadian requirements. With today’s announcement, that process is now complete, and the acceptable terms have been added to the Wares and Services Manual.
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