CN Tower's management company claims that any picture of the landmark building is a trademark violation

It looks like the Canada Lands Company does in fact have a registered trademark for a CN Tower design which covers “books”. So this complaint isn’t as egregious as some trademark complaints that get thrown around.

But there still has to be some element of confusion about the source of the book. Canada Lands’ claim is essentially that anyone who sees the CN Tower on a book would assume that the book is published by them. It seems like notability actually works against them here. Pics of the CN Tower are so prevalent that nobody makes any assumptions about the source of a product just because it has the CN Tower on it. If I see a CN Tower keychain, I’m more likely to assume it comes from a Chinese souvenir mill than I am to assume it comes from Canada Lands Co.

That’s different from, a publisher’s logo. If some other publisher was slapping TOR’s logo on their books, that really would confuse me.

Edited to add: Actually, it looks like the trademark is for “Souvenirs items, namely… books…”, not just books generally. So more points against.

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