Practice Notice: Compliance with Paragraph 30(h) - Marks in a Special Form, Publication Date: 1999-03-10

Compliance with Paragraph 30(h) - Marks in a Special Form

Publication Date: 1999-03-10

In applying the provisions of paragraph 30(h) of the Trade-marks Act, the Office will no longer consider marks to be depicted in a special form, only because they consist of a word or words composed of upper and lower case letters. Therefore, effective immediately, a drawing will no longer be required for these types of marks.

Further, as indicated in the Practice Notice published in the Trade-marks Journal on December 30, 1992, the Trade-marks Office does not consider that an application for the registration of a word or words is depicted in a special form only because it includes French or English punctuation. The French or English punctuation marks recognized are the following:

the period (.), the question mark (?), the exclamation mark (!), the comma (,), the semicolon (;), the colon (:), the ellipsis (...), parentheses ( ), brackets [ ], quotation marks (« »), single quotation marks ( ' '), inverted commas ( ' '), the dash (-), the asterisk (*), the diagonal (/ \), and the underscore ( _ ).

Note: Marks which include French accents will continue to be considered as word marks.