A report this morning on the CBC website says a small Toronto firm is taking the Liberal Party of Canada to court over misappropriation of what it claims is its trademark -- "The Green Shift."
No, I don't know what to make of it either. But if a Montréal restaurant could use the name of Barbie ™ and a small premium furniture store that operates with the name of "Brick" could continue operating despite the overwhelming juggernaut of The Brick ™ one wonders how far this will go.
How could anyone confuse a "green shift" on tax policies, with a company that consults on adopting saner business practises, is beyond my comprehension. But I'm not a trademark lawyer.
Oh, yeah, that snark from PMS the other day about the Liberals' new platform being a resurrection of the National Energy Policy? That's comparing apples to oranges, and also suggests people out West aren't interested in energy conservation. Of course they are and to pretend they are not is just plain ignorant.
UPDATE (11:59 am EDT, 1559 GMT): I had to delete a comment for spam considerations ... but in the interests of equal time here's an alternate viewpoint to the Dion platform -- called the Shifty Green.
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1 comment:
Your kidding right? You don't see the HUGE difference? In the one case you have a BBQ restaurant based in QC that successfully argued that they could not possibly be confused with Barbie a plastic doll with pneumatic breasts.
In the case of Green Shift, you have a company whose bread and butter is to help companies adopt green practices and a (nominally green and likely controversial) tax policy that penalizes people to force them to adopt green practices.
Green Shift is a company that has been around for ten years, they work with a lot of non-partisan green organizations which likely would not want to be perceived as promoting any particular political party's policies. So do ya think these non-partisan orgs are going to be ordering lots of cups, plates and napkins with the phrase Green Shift on them?
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