You can do some preliminary trademark searches yourself through these free sources. Remember, you will be looking for both exact matches and confusingly-similar trademarks and trade names.
Canadian Trademark Registry
This is the official source for checking out registered Canadian trademarks. The Canadian government through CIPO (the Canadian Intellectual Property Office) maintains an on-line registry of trademarks.
Search Engines
A trademark does not have to be registered in order to be valid. These are often called common-law trademarks, and they can be a serious problem. Therefore, you should search for unregistered trademarks as well. Many people use search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.
U.S. Trademark Registry
Trademarks are basically national in scope, so a registered trademark in the U.S. is not an obstacle to a Canadian trademark per se. However, given our increasingly integrated economies, it’s a good idea to search the on-line U.S. Trademark Registry. And what the heck, it’s free anyway.
Smuglers Free Prescreen
We saved the best to last. As a NUANS search house, Smuglers LLP has access to a prescreen that searches the CIPO trademarks database and provincial corporate and business name registrations for 9 of the 10 provinces. You must do the Quebec search separately. Normally, you would have to search the other provincial databases separately, which is a lot of work. However, as a public service and to drum up some business, we offer this as a free service. Free Smuglers Prescreen
Paid Trademark Search
Once you’ve done the free searches, or even instead of them, you can order a comprehensive search from us for $275 + taxes. The main values-added are:
- we use the most comprehensive Canadian government NUANS trademark search, which returns 160 of the closest trademark registry matches. It’s based on search algorithms developed over many years to find the confusingly-similar marks that are otherwise so hard to find. This way you don’t have to guess at the wildcards or similar spellings;
- you will get the opinion of a highly-experienced and clever trademark agent as to whether your mark is a good candidate for registration
You can order the comprehensive search online or better yet give us a call.