Trademarks In A Nutshell

A trademark is a mark that has been adopted to distinguish the source of a particular good and/or service from other sources in a similar line of business.
Trademarks can consist of words and/or a design. Most trademarks are wordmarks, such as Kodak or Coke, design marks, such as Nike’s “swoosh,” or a combination, such as the stylized script for Coca Cola. A tag line, such as ‘Things Go Better with Smuglers” can also be registered.
As soon as you have begun to properly use a valid trademark, you have established it as a ‘common law’ trademark. These ‘common-law’ rights are relatively weak, as well as being both expensive and difficult to enforce.
Registration of a trademark provides much stronger rights, including protection all across Canada.
Registration of your corporate name, business name or domain name does not give you the right to use that name! Registration of a trademark is the best way of protecting a name used in business
After registration, you should monitor the market and the trademarks registry to prevent others from infringing on your trademark. Otherwise you might lose those rights.
There is no annual fee for maintaining a trademark registration. Currently, they must be renewed every 15 years, but that’s likely to change shortly.
There is no such thing as an international trademark. If you want trademark protection in a particular country, then you must register in that country.