Ensuring Lawful Electronic Signatures for Trademark Assignment Agreement in Canada

How to eSign a document: electronic signature lawfulness for Trademark Assignment Agreement in Canada

hello hello welcome back to my channel my name is zarina business lawyer by day and raptors bandwagoner during playoff season so not this year today's episode's super exciting we're actually going to be talking about how to trademark a business name and logo here in canada but we're going to be doing it a little bit differently we're actually going to look at the trademark application filed by vanessa bryant on behalf of kobe bryant and hopefully by the end of this video you're going to be able to get tips and ideas of how to file your own trademark application so that you can continue to protect your brand and continue to protect the legacy that you've worked so hard to create let's go the first step in filling out trademark applications is deciding which things should be trademarked just a quick refresher like what is a trademark a trademark is uh any word sound phrase basically anything you have that can distinguish you from anybody else in the marketplace so people used to think that trademarks were just words and logos but now actually it's been expanding so even tastes and there's this thing called distinguishing guises and basically if you can just prove to the intellectual property office that there's this one thing that you do that basically anyone who thinks about it will be like yep that's that's that company and if you can prove that then you get that trademark and this is actually used quite often in clothing and accessories so who knows maybe we might find a distinguishing guys for kobe's the cool thing with trademarks is their property rights so it's not like when you register a business name and a provincial registry like that's more so a legal compliance thing because a trademark is a property right you can actually will it to someone you can you can make it last for generations you can transfer it to someone else and therefore if you actually are able to register a trademark it increases the value of your company now let's turn to the trademark applications filed by copy brian's estate one of the blogs that i follow it's a fashion law blog and one of the articles was really interesting because it was talking about how kobe bryant's date filed an application for a lot of trademarks and if you believe the rumors it might be that there is an apparel line that is on the way actually there is another lawyer another law firm that looked into these applications and gave us an idea that there might be clothing there might be websites there might be games coming up soon we don't know but what's cool is if these applications actually get approved it gives kobe bryant llc the applicant sorry so this kobe bryant llc is the corporation that was started by kobe bryant's estate if this gets approved then that corporation will be able to get the exclusive rights to continue on kobe bryant's legacy which is pretty cool so what does that mean for us it's fairly similar actually here in canada if you file a trademark application and it actually you know gets approved by the canadian intellectual property office then you get the exclusive right to be able to use it in canada for up to 10 years and then it's renewable after that but there are some exceptions again and it's that basically like if you abandon it like you stop using your trademark the intellectual property office deems it to be have been abandoned so you lose that exclusivity because they're like well if you're not gonna protect it so why should we protect it you know like why should we give you that right now most businesses when they register they start with registering their work sometimes it's their business name sometimes it's a phrase like a slogan for example but when we look into trademarking words i want you to think about it in three different tiers now the first tier is something that's more likely to get approved so these are names that you just make up for the sake of this video where i'm just going to say kobe's trademark applications but really when i say that um please think about it as kobe's estate trademark applications okay cool so if you look here at his trademark application we'll see an application for mambasita which we know is his nickname for gigi so for us if you have a brand name that's just totally made up so for example global like complete so just from a branding perspective if we have a name that's totally made up it's easier to get that through the intellectual property office and get it registered so the second tier is registering business names that are personal names so personal names they're not necessarily impossible to trademark they're just a lot harder um so the cpo doesn't necess doesn't always like trademarking those things but if you can show that there's enough of a reputation sipo's more likely going to approve the registration of that trademark so if you look here at kobe's applications so from 1998 like you can see like his super business-minded you can see that he's trying to register his name and then you see this little note about living person got consent so it's the same thing here in canada if the person is alive and you're trying to register that name of course sipo would want to make sure that there's actually consent that that person has consented to it because obviously they don't want to be trademarking something that the other that the person who actually owns that thing doesn't want it to be trademarked so and then if you look here 2020 so there is another application for kobe bryant's name and again if it was in canada because it has a reputation it's likely going to go through you know like kobe bryant is a legend he's in the hall of fame so it's likely that this personal name will also go through if kobe bryant was canadian and now we're off to tier number three so this is like extra hard level if you really want to go for it generic names so you can trademark generic names like names that you can find in a dictionary but it's super super super impossible not impossible it's just super super super hard we mentioned already that trademarks are property rights so of course people wants to balance the right of other people who to be able to use certain words right like we don't want to have to go to court every single time someone uses a word that can be found in the dictionary but it's not necessarily impossible so as long as the name is not related to the goods or the services that the brand is actually you know promoting in the marketplace then that's generally okay and that's why apple the company that creates the macintosh computer that creates our ipods it was able to be registered here in canada because it's not you know computers aren't necessarily related to apple the fruit but snapple apple couldn't register the apple part in their name because snap apple creates fruit juices and an apple is a fruit so if you look here black mamba the application it had nothing to do with snakes and snake products so that was okay it'll be the same thing here in canada what will be interesting here is the application for mamba because mamba is just a generic word for snake so we'll see if it's going to be possible hearing here in canada like apple was okay so maybe it'll be possible but again sipo doesn't really like registering words and even if we translated mamba into something else into a different language if it was just in canada it'll be hard still because people also doesn't generally like registering translations another thing that businesses may want to register is their logo so if you look into kobe's applications so we can see here there's the application for the black mamba logo and then here is an application for kobe signature so for personal brands right like you can have the logo of your business but you can also try to register your signature now it's interesting to note here that separate trademark applications need to be filed for different trademarks so you'll have different trademark applications for different words for different logos different designs even though they're kind of similar or kind of related you still need to file a separate trademark application for each kobe has actually filed over 50 trademark applications and at present there's 16 which are associated with kobe that are registered at the uss trademarks and patents office just as an aside what kobe has done to register his trademarks is really neat like just from a personal brand like that kind of business perspective because for professional athletes where career ending injuries are pretty career ending it's neat to see that there's a way to leverage the personal brand that he's been building the reputation that he's been building into other business ventures and because registered trademarks are considered as property therefore they have value then it's neat because it allows him to be able to continue providing for his family and to continue on leveraging the reputation that he's worked so hard to build in order to be able to provide for them even after his finished his career in basketball by the way have you seen your basketball like if you have like make sure to comment below because it's really neat i really want to geek out with someone over that animation now once you've chosen your trademarks which classes do you pick the class you choose depends on what you are going to be using or are already using your trademarks for if you look here at kobe signature so we see that it's going to be for audio visual things for clothing for a website for licensing ip so it's quite broad there's quite a few different classes so that they're able to protect their exclusive right to use this trademark for these different things so there are different goods that this trademark is associated with now if you look here at mamba league like we see that oh it's got youth program in sports so trademarks can also you can choose a class that's based on the services that you want this trademark to be associated with so this class is super exciting and super interesting because kobe already has the trademark rights to mamba sports academy you know like it provides training and sports training and conducts sports programming so if you believe the rumors there might be signs to come so it's the same thing in canada we have to describe what these trademarks are going to be associated with in the marketplace in the way that our customers our clients are going to be able to associate them with so if for example if you are a certain company we're not a purveyor of accommodations and experiences we're simply an online platform to bug temporary accommodations now as canadians we actually have it quite easy our cpo has actually published a goods and services manual so you can actually just search for your service there and then it'll give you a bunch of ideas for what class your trademark can be associated with so this is a pre-approved list so here in canada you can see that it's approved to have operation of sports camps downloadable video games apparel but we can also add descriptions that are not in the goods and services manual we just have to be careful and because canada is party to the madrid protocol we can actually file just one trademark application and that would send it off to the world intellectual property office and we're able to register our trademark to the countries who have signed on to people which is pretty cool but even if you didn't want to protect our trademark across a few different countries and by a few different countries i mean a lot more different countries we still have to find the nice classification of our businesses so i'll link the goods and services manual and the nice classification below and if this is interesting to you make sure you scroll down below and grab my free gift it's a quick guide on how to choose the trademark class for your businesses and your products and once you've actually filed your trademark applications and you get it registered it becomes your progress and property owned by a person that's not willed it goes to the state so what that means is whoever is entitled to your property is able to have the rights of that trademark i.e they get the exclusive right to use it because kobe bryant the person owned the rights to the mamba logo and to his signature so his personal rights it went to the state so that's why vanessa bryant was able to establish a company and that company was able to then file trademark applications to protect the use of kobe bryant's signature and the mamba logo because it wouldn't be quite fair that kobe worked so hard to build this reputation and other people will be able to exploit it and will be able to use it without his family the people who kobe actually loves without them getting the benefit of the use of these trademarks so what did you think did you like this video would you be applying for your own trademarks let me know in the comments below i'd love to know what you think um and if you do want to see more videos like this make sure to hit like and so that i know that you like seeing this kind of content but if you also don't want to see videos like this make sure you hit this like um and in the meantime i'll see you in the comments and i'll catch you next week till then cheers