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Trademark
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Date sent: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 19:10:30 -0600
Oops big snip
Diane, you can contact consumer and corporate affairs for
trademark and stamping info.
If you quality stamp you must also have a trademark stamp on a
piece. It is not legal to quality stamp a piece without it. Only a
very few solder joins (3 in a sterling object) are allowable
because it lowers the alloy too much. Some people get around this
by adding a fine silver chunk to a silver object to counterbalance
this. In gold you can use plumb solders, that is solders which are
the same carat (gold percentage) as the gold alloy itself. If you
have a gold piece with a sterling rivet you may stamp the gold
part gold.(and the sterling rivet sterling) If the gold piece has
a small piece of sterling soldered to it you may only stamp the
piece sterling, ie the lower quality part. One might make a case
(I would not want to try) that one stamps in proportion to the
proportions of the volumes present (like cereal boxes), so 14k,
s/s925 etc.
One of a kind work is seldom tested in real life (they smelt it
and test the melted and destroyed article) but production work is
done regularly. the Canadians are fairly reasonable however and
after notifying you of your error you have in general 7 days to
fix it (get it out of the store, otherwise fix the problem)
You must register a trademark, in Canada this is fairly easy,
costs about 150 dollars and while the process is occuring you have
the legal right to stamp items. If your trademark is denied then
you must stop using it. You can however have access to the
trademark database free at federal government offices (this used
to be unavailable without a lawyer and $500 fees to them)
There are now international trademarks available (can someone on
the list comment on this?), otherwise one might technically have
to trademark in every country you sold in.
You can sell anything if it is not quality stamped (customers
don’t like it) and you don’t claim in writing that it is a certain
quality, ie if your card in the shop says sterling you had better
have a trademark but if you only say silver you are safe (if
potentially sleazy).
In the states it used to be (and still is) a kind of free for all
and many Americans don’t know that they are required to use a
trademark (which they didn’t used to) if they quality stamped-but
now their federal governemnt is being more hard nosed about it.
Brain Press
Box 1624, Ste M
Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7
Canada
tel: 403-263-3955
fax: 403-283-9053
Email: brainnet@cadvision.com