All

SSL is Here

It was a full week here on the website front.

Observant users will have noticed, from Wednesday or so, that we now have a secure, encrypted "https" connection, with the little lock icon, in most browsers. You can click on the lock and the browser will display the certificate information, among other things.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty introduced Canada's 2013 budget on March 21, 2013. In the big picture, the budget's public focus was on a revised program for skills and job training -- a topic certainly relevant for businesses of all sizes. And the general-level impression of that program is that businesses will be expected to kick in one-third of the training cost, up to $5,000, for each worker taking advantage of that program.

It bears repeating. In Trademarkland in Canada, your right to obtain registration of your mark mostly depends on whether you have “used” the mark in the ordinary course of business. And your ability to keep the mark alive after obtaining registration also requires continued “use” of the mark, in that special Trademarkland sense of the word “use”.

All trademark owners need clearly to understand what behaviour is required in order to meet the level and kind of “use” required under the rules for trademark registration.

Use for Goods

Our fingernails are a little more ragged than yesterday, but everything is up, working and accessible.

DNS changes took about an hour to propagate, with TTL (time to live) cranked down to minimum values. This blog needed a little clean-up to make it work again, and now we’re back.

To the editor:

Now that the PST is to be restored, perhaps someone who voted for that result, or the government, will explain why it is a good thing that, almost alone out of major service providers, clients of lawyers will again face PST of 7 percent on legal fees.

People will remember that, back in the 1990s, the NDP changed sales tax policy, to extend PST to legal services. But the Liberals have not reversed that decision.

When a Canadian business owner thinks about setting up in the US, often the first question is what kind of corporate structure should be used.

In simple terms, the choices available for a business structure in the US are similar to the choices available in Canada. The reason why different structures exist is that they allow different combinations of limited liability and tax treatment for the entity and its owners.
 

You can observe a lot by watching - Yogi Berra

I like to watch - Chance the Gardener, from the Peter Sellers movie, Being There

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.

Before adopting a trademark, it’s wise to carry out various kinds of searches on that mark. You’re trying to find out, as best as you can, whether someone else has already adopted the mark for their business.

However, all too often, calls come in where the process has been reversed: the trademark owner has chosen their mark and finalized all their domain registrations and possibly even their corporation name, and it’s only at that point that they turn their mind to finding out whether their chosen mark is in fact available as a trademark.

This article is left here for historical reference. On the whole, amendments to the US/Canada Tax Treaty that came into effect in early 2010 generally make Canadian ULCs undesirable. That said, as of October 2012, we still have some demand for these vehicles, based on current advice. Be sure that you've got good income tax advisers on each side of the US/Canada border if you're going to use a Canadian ULC in your business structure.

Good news for US businesses or US residents looking to do business in Canada!

We incorporate a lot of Canadian corporations that have non-residents as directors or shareholders of the corporation. And, although it's easy for most non-residents to create or take part in Canadian companies, it's perhaps not so easy to be aware of the Canadian income tax rules that apply when the company wants to pay money to or for non-residents. One of those rules has to do with "withholding tax", which is sometimes called "Part XIII" tax for the section of the Income Tax Act (Canada) in which it arises.