February 2010

In the summer of 2009, we had to replace our phone system, such as it was.

I find phone systems to be mysterious. For all the simplicity that we've grown up with in terms of picking up the handset and dialing, if you actually have to go out looking for a phone system, it's a murky part of technology.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, before the rise of Google, one tactic that people used to get traffic to their website was to insert a widely used search term (such as Playboy) in their webpages, usually in the meta tags or as hidden text. People searching on Playboy would instead find themselves clicking through to the website, where they’d be offered a chance to buy widgets instead of whatever they had been looking for. Playboy rightly complained about that use of its trademark.

Introducing Trademark-land

Over the years, I’ve learned that, in approaching many areas of law, a good mental habit to adopt is to treat the area of law as being different from all other areas of endeavour. That is, in most cases, if you approach a particular area of law with what would otherwise be typical or ordinary beliefs, associations and connotations that you use (probably successfully) in operating the rest of your life, you’ll probably come to grief.

Canada will be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern trademark world. In December 2009, CIPO issued a request for comments that would see amendments made to the Trade-marks Act to better align the Canadian system with the trademark systems used by major and minor countries.

Comments will be received until March 15, 2010, by fax or e-mail to the person specified in the request.