Industry committee  Yes, there are two issues there. Issue number one, is XYZ actually confusing with XYZA? There are many factors that the professional looks at in determining that. The other is the nuances, as Ms. Fuhrer was suggesting, of doing actual searching. I've been practising for over 30 y

Industry committee  The reliability of that previous search goes down as time passes. So whether you draw the line at two months or four months, by six months you're doing a different search.

Industry committee  I do not. Michel, are you aware of any?

Industry committee  That's true, but it's used by practitioners who, when searching a mark and noting that a declaration of use was filed recently, will suspect that the mark may still be in use in Canada and suggest to a client that this is not one to challenge. It's not used by the courts. It is,

Industry committee  Yes. It is one of the many tools.

Industry committee  Whatever the benefit may be, IPIC is not opposed to adopting the treaties per se.

Industry committee  I have not. I wouldn't necessarily attribute anything to that. It's happened very quickly and I'm not sure that news of this has filtered out, and if it has, whether there's a complete understanding on the businesses' side of what it actually means. But I have not heard murmurs o

Industry committee  If I understand the question, you're asking whether there are certain types of businesses that are more dependent upon their trademarks. There certainly are. A franchise, for example, would be a business that is very heavily dependent on trademarks. There would be certain types o

Industry committee  I would think it would be large institutional businesses that sell multiple consumer products. That's the first thing that comes to mind. I'm not going to mention any specifically by name, but businesses that sell household detergents to diapers, businesses that sell stereo heads

Industry committee  Just to make sure I understand, again, you're saying that, if somebody registers a trademark without having used it and it turns out there is a business that has used that trademark, there are measures in the Trade-marks Act itself, including having to resort to the Federal Court

Industry committee  We talked about the clutter on the register. I think that's an important one because it takes a lot of trademarks out of circulation, and there are few enough as it is. I think there is a certain amount of upheaval involved in taking a hundred-some years of case law defining trad

Industry committee  I suppose anybody can challenge anything. I don't know enough about the division of powers to be able to say whether the trade and commerce power that the federal government has is exceeded in any way by this.

Industry committee  That would be my most significant concern.

Industry committee  I will add to that point that the Nice classification system is a little bit odd by today's standards. For example, metal garbage cans and plastic garbage cans fall into two different classes. In a system that moves toward a per-class fee, you would end up paying a lot more to co

Industry committee  Well, it could be fairly significant, I think, if in fact squatters start to see this opportunity and go the way things went with domain names. I think that could actually be very significant, because the onus is thrust upon the person who considers that they rightfully own this