CNET reports on efforts by Psion Teklogix, a Mississauga-based company, to send out hundreds of cease and desist letters to manufacturers, retailers, bloggers, and journalists to use stop using the term "netbooks."
Post Tagged with: "trademark"
Canadian Trademark Act Reforms Come Into Force
The Canadian Trademark Blog reports that new Trade-marks Act reforms came into effect on January 1st that block Canadian wine makers from using terms such as Burgundy and Bourgogne.
VANOC Seeks to Trademark Part of O’Canada
When the Canadian government introduced overbroad and unnecessary legislation to protect Olympic marks, the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee claimed that the legislation was necessary to guard against ambush marketing. Fresh off that legislative win, VANOC is now going for more gold. The Globe and Mail reports that it has applied […]
CIRA Creates Backdoor WHOIS Exceptions for Police and IP Owners
Earlier this year, I wrote glowingly about the new CIRA whois policy, which took effect today and which I described as striking the right balance between access and privacy. The policy was to have provided new privacy protection to individual registrants – hundreds of thousands of Canadians – by removing the public disclosure of their personal contact information (though the information is collected and stored by domain name registrars).
Apparently I spoke too soon. Faced with the prospect of a privacy balance, special interests representing law enforcement and trademark holders quietly pressured CIRA to create a backdoor that will enable these two groups (and these two groups alone) to have special access to registrant information. In the case of law enforcement, police can bring cases to CIRA involving immediate risk to children or the Internet (ie. denial-of-service attacks) and CIRA will hand over registrant information without court oversight. In the case of trademark holders (as well as copyright and patent owners), claims that a domain name infringes their rights will be enough to allow CIRA to again disclose registrant information.
This represents a stunning about-face after years of public consultation on the whois policy.
Toronto Star on “Fencing Off the English Language”
The Toronto Star features an article on how private interests have been using trademark and copyright to fence off the English language.
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