As part of its ongoing efforts to enhance the efficiency and consistency of trademark examination, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) has recently published a set of guidelines on how to describe a wide variety of goods and services to meet the levels of specificity deemed acceptable by CIPO. These guidelines are intended to supplement the notes found in CIPO’s Goods and Services Manual for “retired” terms that are deemed unacceptable without further specificity.
For each retired or insufficiently specified term listed in the guidelines, information on how to specify the term to meet the minimum acceptable level of specificity is provided along with examples of acceptable descriptions. Accordingly, applicants can now refer to both the Goods and Services Manual as well as the recently published guidelines to select or prepare a tailored list of goods/services that are more likely to be accepted by CIPO and pre-approved for accelerated examination at the pre-assessment stage of the trademark application process (see our earlier article here and our backgrounder on pre-assessment here).
While CIPO has continued to expand the list of acceptable and pre-approved terms in the Goods and Services Manual, there will still be instances where an applicant’s goods/services do not fit nicely into the pre-approved list. In such instances, there is a mechanism in place for submitting a request with CIPO to have one (or more) terms added to the Goods and Services Manual. The turnaround time for receiving a response from CIPO that either accepts or rejects such a submission typically ranges from 4 to 6 weeks.
If you need any assistance, please contact a member of our trademarks team.
