Today Ministers of Industry and
Public Safety tabled Bill C-56, Combating Counterfeit Products Act.
According to its summary, Bill C-56 amends the Copyright Act and the Trade-marks
Act to add new civil and criminal remedies and new border measures in both Acts,
in order to strengthen the enforcement of copyright and trade-mark rights and
to curtail commercial activity involving infringing copies and counterfeit
trade-marked goods. More specifically, the enactment

(a) creates new civil causes of
action with respect to activities that sustain commercial activity in
infringing copies and counterfeit trade-marked goods;

(b) creates new criminal offences
for trade-mark counterfeiting that are analogous to existing offences in the
Copyright Act;

(c) creates new criminal offences
prohibiting the possession or export of infringing copies or counterfeit
trade-marked goods, packaging or labels;

(d) enacts new border enforcement
measures enabling customs officers to detain goods that they suspect infringe
copyright or trade-mark rights and allowing them to share information relating
to the detained goods with rights owners who have filed a request for
assistance, in order to give the rights owners a reasonable opportunity to
pursue a remedy in court;

(e) exempts the importation and
exportation of copies and goods by an individual for their personal use from
the application of the border measures; and

(f) adds the offences set out in the
Copyright Act and the Trade-marks Act to the list of offences set
out in the Criminal Code for the investigation of which police may seek
judicial authorization to use a wiretap.

The enactment also amends the Trade-marks
Act to, among other things, expand the scope of what can be registered as a
trade-mark, allow the Registrar of Trade-marks to correct errors that appear in
the trade-mark register, and streamline and modernize the trade-mark
application and opposition process.

Full
text of the Bill.

Government press
release.