Starting in January 2025, the Trademarks Opposition Board (TMOB) will initiate a pilot project to proactively send section 45 expungement notices for a limited number of randomly selected trademark registrations. The TMOB is planning to issue 100 of such notices in January, 2025, and then 50 in each of February and March, 2025. Whether or not this practice will be continued after March, 2025 remains to be determined.

If a trademark owner receives such a notice from the Registrar, it will need to provide evidence to show use of each of the goods and services listed in the registration for the three-year period preceding the date of the section 45 notice. The registration may then be amended to remove goods and/or services for which no satisfactory evidence is provided or even cancelled if no satisfactory evidence is provided.

The motivation behind this pilot project is to ensure that the Register of Trademarks accurately reflects trademarks that are in use. The pilot project aims to assess how a Registrar-controlled mechanism performs compared to the established process of third-party initiated expungement proceedings. The Registrar will collect relevant data in relation to the pilot project and publish the data on an ongoing basis.

To learn more about the pilot project and access the various resources, visit the official pilot project webpage.