Public Message Regarding Infringement of CaseWare’s “IDEA” Trade-mark Rights
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) has announced that they will be replacing their EDGAR database with an XBRL enabled platform, an exciting development for users of financial data and for the XBRL world in general, in which CaseWare has played a part for over eight years.
Unfortunately, the SEC proposes to adopt as a trade-mark for its software a trade-mark which is exactly the same as the trade-mark used by CaseWare and its predecessors in title for over 20 years for its software, “IDEA”. Our IDEA trade-mark was registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2001. We are completely dumbfounded as to why someone at the SEC did not do even the most rudimentary trade-mark search before announcing such a major project, or even worse, did such a search then chose to ignore the results. As might be expected, use by the SEC of a trade-mark exactly the same as ours for software directed to the same community of users for overlapping functions has caused confusion in the marketplace with customers and prospects wondering if the SEC software is our software or vice versa. If you are aware of any confusion that has occurred in this regard, please let us know as we would like to clear it up.
Despite the daunting prospect of a relatively small company challenging the resources of the SEC, we are taking the necessary steps to defend our trade-mark and the considerable investment we have made in it.
CaseWare International Inc.
CaseWare IDEA Inc.
