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City and Mayor Settle Up

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In our posting of June 25, 2007 we reported on an application by the Mayor of the City of Vancouver to register the mark ECODENSITY in his own name. The application raised a few eyebrows because on the face of it, the program that the mark related to appeared to be one that the City had funded and it wasn’t clear why the Mayor would be filing an application in his own name rather than in the name of the City.

Following the advertisement of that application, the City of Vancouver Councillor’s Office filed an Opposition. According to the Canadian Intellectual Property Office online database, matters seem to finally have been resolved between the City and its Mayor, as the application has now been assigned to the City. As one of our readers has noted, the open question now is whether that application, which was based on proposed use, or any resulting registration will be valid, if in fact the Mayor, as he claimed in a news report at the time, never had the intention to use the mark himself.

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Neil Melliship is a Partner and co-chair of the Intellectual Property and Information Technology practice groups at the Vancouver-based Canadian law firm of Clark Wilson LLP. Neil is a lawyer and a registered Canadian Trademark Agent, who actively speaks and writes on trademark and other IP issues including those relating to the Internet, domain name disputes and e-commerce. Neil is consistently rated as a Leading Trademark Practitioner—Individuals: Prosecution and Strategy, by the World Trademark Review (WTR) 1000. Neil is also listed in the Canadian Legal Lexpert Directory as Rated Repeatedly Recommended in the area of Intellectual Property. He has also been repeatedly named by Best Lawyers in Canada in the categories of Intellectual Property Law, Technology Law and Information Technology Law.