Intellectual Property
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October 22, 2025
Court sets aside expungement of video game trademark due to notice issue
The Federal Court has set aside a decision of the registrar in a case where a video game company claimed it did not receive notice of a challenge to its trademark resulting in it being expunged.
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October 21, 2025
Trademark confusion and nature of the parties’ goods and business and trade
The Federal Court considered whether the Trademarks Opposition Board was wrong to find that the nearly identical trademarks CHEFS-OWN for bean sprouts and CHEF’S OWN for sauces and seasonings could coexist because the channels of trade and the nature of the goods were sufficiently dissimilar that confusion was unlikely?
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October 21, 2025
Parliamentary privilege, Indigenous sentencing, spoliation among highlights of SCC’s fall session
The Supreme Court of Canada’s busy and diverse fall session includes weighty constitutional, criminal and Aboriginal law appeals that have attracted the participation of dozens of interveners. By the time the top court’s fall session ends on Dec. 12, 2025, the court will have heard some 20 cases, split between civil and criminal appeals.
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October 17, 2025
Timothée Doutriaux joins Smart & Biggar
Smart & Biggar has named Timothée Doutriaux as a patent agent joining the Patents: EICT group in Ottawa and Montréal.
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October 16, 2025
Swapna Prakash new associate at Gilbert’s LLP
Swapna Prakash is a new associate at Gilbert’s LLP, where she will support the litigation team.
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October 15, 2025
Federal Court overturns TMOB ruling for narrowing confusion test to past use
The Federal Court has set aside the Trademarks Opposition Board’s (TMOB) dismissal of a trademark opposition, ruling that the board erred by limiting its confusion analysis to the opponent’s actual use of its mark rather than the full scope of its registration.
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October 14, 2025
AI in criminal law practice: Risks, realities, and practical applications
AI has made a lot of news in the past few years. It can generate music, do homework and even be your girlfriend. Law hasn’t been immune to the AI craze, either. However, there have been challenges in successfully integrating AI into law practices.
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October 14, 2025
Privacy regulators discuss AI, cybersecurity and data risks in annual meeting
Federal, provincial and territorial information and privacy commissioners, along with ombudspersons responsible for access and privacy laws, concluded their two-day meeting in Banff focusing on emerging issues including cybersecurity risks, protection of children online and the use of AI in tribunals, the legal practice and health care.
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October 10, 2025
SCC clarifies when Quebec 10-year ‘extinctive prescription’ period reboots for collecting on judgments
The Supreme Court of Canada ruled 9-0 in a Quebec appeal that filing and serving a notice to seize property counts as a judicial application interrupting the 10-year deadline to collect payment on a judgment — thereby restarting for a further 10 years the “extinctive prescription” period (comparable to a limitation period in the common law provinces) that applies to rights resulting from most money judgments under art. 2924 of the Civil Code of Québec.
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October 08, 2025
Fraser calls provinces’ demand to scrap Ottawa’s SCC arguments on notwithstanding clause ‘untenable’
Attorney General of Canada Sean Fraser has pushed back against the demands of five premiers that Ottawa should drop its novel arguments at the Supreme Court that there are substantive constraints on governments’ powers to invoke the Charter’s s. 33 “notwithstanding” clause — arguments that those five provinces contend “represent a complete disavowal of the constitutional bargain that brought the Charter into being” in 1982.