Canadian Trademark Registration: Canadian IP Office

Incase you would like to sell your services or products in Canada, and then it would be a good idea that you have an office opened in Canada itself. Once you are selling products in Canada then it would be important that there be a Canadian trademark registration for your product which can be done at the Canadian IP Office.

IP stands for Intellectual Property. The Canadian IP Office is the equivalent of the USPTO. And incase you think that a registration with the USPTO is more than enough then you should take into consideration that while doing business in Canada there are Canadian laws that govern that country and therefore you would be better served if you also register at the intellectual property office in Canada.

Before you start for the process of Canada trademark registration you should be aware of the benefits of registering. Firstly it gives you a fresh source of identity that will help you get an image that is different from others in the marketplace. The main objective of a trademark is that it helps separate the identity of a single business from other businesses that the same stands for the intellectual property. You should be mindful of the fact there are a number of competitors that exist in the same marketplace today, and therefore the only way you can survive is to create a brand that can be noticed. And one major step to achieve this is that the uniqueness of the trademark which should catch the imagination of the public where they instantly associate the trademark with your product.

For big businesses their trademark protection is their business protection. And the only way to achieve that is by the way of registering your trademark and that will make it unlawful for your competitors to use a trademark similar to yours'.

Thus to protect your brand in Canada one should get trademark registration from the intellectual property office in Canada. For doing that you would need to be aware of how to go about the filing process of the application for registering a trademark. This office does the same job as done by the registration office in the US. The intellectual property office in Canada or CIPO has the duty of accepting and then evaluating trademark applications & thereafter granting registration to the qualified ones.

The primary step is that of completing the requirements of the CIPO for application and registration of a trademark. A filing cost of nearly $250 is charged of online application submission and $50 more through a mail process. Once the application has reached them you are allotted an application number, a file is made in your name and a filing date is there. The file is stored as pending and is put forward. CIPO shall let you know of the status of the application either by mail or by calling and also at the same time acknowledge your application’s receipt.

It is then that your application comes up for examination. A CIPO trained officer shall take up your file and evaluate the application and he is the one who shall make a decision on the approval or rejection of the trademark, incase of it being rejected the grounds on which the rejection was caused shall be intimated to you, but that is not the end of it. Once you have your application back you can correct the mistakes and send it back for approval.

Once you have approval you can give an advertisement for the same. The approved trademark will then be issued Trade-marks Journal that has a weekly edition; you can either subscribe to it or get at any major library. Incase in the time of two months of continuous advertisement there is no opposition then it is deemed as being in your ownership.

Now it might be clearly known that the whole process is a time consuming but highly rewarding one too. Incase you think that you cannot go through this lengthy process yourself then you shall be better served by hiring the services of a lawyer who is good in the area of intellectual property. They focus in copyright, patents and trademarks. Such a lawyer shall be apt to guide you through the entire trademark process.