Canadian Trademark Blog

Change in Canadian Trademark Opposition Practice

As an update to our earlier post, the Canadian Trade-marks Opposition Board has introduced a new Practice Notice – Practice in Trade-mark Opposition Proceedings – which comes into effect March 31, 2009.

Some of the important changes that will be brought into effect through this new Practice Notice include:

• introduction of “cooling-off” periods, whereby each side may request one extension of time up to a maximum of 9 months
• guidance as to what constitutes exceptional circumstances for requests for extensions of time beyond the maximum benchmarks
• clarification regarding benchmarks for the Registrar’s granting of extensions of time
• changes in the scheduling of hearings

This new Practice Notice replaces all prior Practice Notices that the Board had issued in respect of Opposition proceedings.  However, proceedings involving applications advertised prior to October 1, 2007 will still be conducted in accordance with the Trade-marks Regulations, as they read on September 30, 2007.

This entry was posted by Karen Monteith on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Trade-mark Oppositions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.