Corporate Knights Jousts with Maclean’s
Maclean’s magazine’s recent June cover story “Canada’s 50 Best Corporate Citizens” has drawn the ire of the magazine Corporate Knights. Corporate Knights claims that it has been grading corporate citizenship since 2002 and annually releases such rankings under the title ”Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada”.
As well, Corporate Knights has filed a trade-mark application for the phrase, which application remains pending. Corporate Knigths claims that Maclean’s story encroaches upon its trade-mark rights and, as such, has apparently had its lawyers send a letter to Maclean’s demanding that all copies containing the story be pulled from circulation and destroyed, that Maclean’s print a retraction and pay Corporate Knights $4 million. In response, Maclean’s has pointed out the descriptive nature of the claimed trade-mark.
To increase pressure on Maclean’s (and in all likelihood to increase its own profile) Corporate Knights is using social media to highlight its story, having created a Facebook group, and is calling for the editor of Maclean’s to debate the editor of Corporate Knights regarding corporate responsibility.
Interestingly, we note that an online story on macleans.ca refers to “The Jantzi-Maclean’s Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2009″.
This entry was posted by Karen Monteith on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Branding. 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.
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[...] Firstly, it has been insinuated that Macleans “borrowed” the idea for their June cover story Canada’s 50 Best Corporate Citizens. It turns out that Corporate Knights magazine, run by my friends Toby Heaps and Karen Kun, has published an eerily similar ranking scheme since 2002 called Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada. Now, I’m no lawyer, but that seems a bit too close for comfort. Corporate Knights is now exploring legal action against Macleans according to the Canadian Trademark Blog. [...]