The Federal Court of Appeal took the occasion of an appeal of the order of the Patented Medicines Prices Review Board (the “Board”) that required a patentee to share reports on medicines that were no longer under patent, to reaffirm the jurisdiction of the Board.

Courts have consistently held that the Board’s jurisdiction is limited to patented medicines and does not extend to medicines for which the patent has expired.^[1]

The Board ordered Galderma Canada Inc. (“Galderma”) to provide reports on sales for six years after the patent had expired.

Galderma had provided the reports while the medicine was . . . [more]

When was the last time you heard someone talk about NFTs? Was it when Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon showed off their Bored Apes on national television back in January of 2022? Or perhaps it was when Donald Trump unveiled his line of NFTs in December 2022. Or maybe, just maybe, you have that one friend who still insists, daily and with unwavering conviction, that NFTs are poised for a triumphant comeback, that the future of art is non-fungible, and that you’re a fool for not mortgaging your home to buy a JPEG of a doge meme. For the rest . . . [more]

The week of October 7th this year was quite something for Artificial Intelligence (AI). It was the object of two consecutive Nobel Prizes, awarded just days apart. The first, in Physics, went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton (a British Canadian) for laying the foundations of machine learning. The second in Chemistry, won by Demis Hassabis, John Jumper, and David Baker, was for utilizing AI to predict millions of intricate protein structures that are key to understanding molecular interactions.

In stark contrast to this double triumph are some 20 copyright infringement suits filed against OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, . . . [more]

In R v. Pike^[1] the Ontario Court of Appeal considered the expansive search power of Customs and Border officers under s. 99(1)(a) of the Customs Act.^[2]

The Ontario Court of Appeal set the stage for the conflict between the respectful approach to border security and individual privacy rights as follows:

Millions of Canadians travel internationally each year with their personal computers, tablets, and smartphones. The contents of these devices attract some of the strongest privacy interests known to law because they are a window into their users’ lifestyles, beliefs, interests, desires, relationships, finances, health, and much more. But

Patents have a reputation of being difficult to read and understand and a key part of most patent litigation proceedings is ‘construing’ or providing meaning to the claims of the patent. A recent decision of the Federal Court considered a series of claims which it determined were not possible to be understood – the claims were ambiguous. As a result, the claims were declared invalid.

Declaring claims invalid for being ambiguous is rarely done in Canada. Various decisions have held over the years that claims are invalid for being ambiguous only if it is not possible to give the claim . . . [more]

In July of last year, Canada’s three research-funding agencies set out to improve public and academic access to the studies they sponsor. Open access to research and scholarship is proving to be the digital era’s great gift to science, and all the more so, following open access’ contributions to Covid vaccine development during the pandemic. The plan for Canada’s Tri-Agency, as it is known, was to review and revise its Open Access Policy by identifying “the key features of an effective, comprehensive, sustainable and equitable immediate OA Policy for peer-reviewed articles, and the incentives and supports required for the Policy’s . . . [more]

The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) remains one of the bodies responsible for compliance with Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL).

On April 4, 2023, Canadian police services participated in an internationally coordinated enforcement action against the Genesis Market that traded in stolen credentials and account access. The Genesis Market had over 1.5 million bots and over 2,000,000 identities when it was shut down. It was one of the largest criminal facilitators at the time.

Canadian police worked closely with law enforcement authorities in 17 countries in this coordinated effort. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation led the international operation . . . [more]

As a faculty member of Simon Fraser University, I recently participated in a SFU Faculty Association vote on a motion “calling upon SFU to divest from Israeli commercial interests, suspend partnerships with Israeli universities, and offer concrete support for Palestinian faculty and students.” Such motions have been common across universities around the world during the “situation in Gaza,” as the motion calls it. The inordinate loss of life and suffering of the Israel-Hamas War has led to campus disruptions that have not been seen since the Vietnam War roiled campuses more than half-a century ago (during my student days at . . . [more]

Much concern was expressed on whether a technological protection measure could be used despite the fair dealing user’s right to effectively lock up a work forever.

Some parts if the answer to this issue have been found by the Federal Court in 1395804 Ontario Ltd. (Blacklock’s Reporter) v. Canada (Attorney General), 2024 FC 829.

This case came to the Court by an unusual procedure. The day before the plaintiff, Blacklock’s Reporter, dismissed its claim of copyright infringement against Parks Canada, Parks Canada filed an application for summary judgment and a counterclaim. After the Court established that the counterclaim could . . . [more]

What happens when an intellectual property enforcement proceeding takes too long? Most IP cases in Canada take place in the Federal Court where the rules around dismissals for delay are different than in the provincial superior courts.

In the Ontario Superior Court, after a pandemic hiatus, the court is resuming administrative dismissals of civil cases that have not been set down for trial in a timely manner. As noted in the most recent , “Administrative dismissals under the court rules are intended to promote the timely resolution of legal disputes, discourage delays, and increase efficiencies in the court system.”

For . . . [more]

“This is the largest theft in the United States, period.” Such is the judgment of author and scriptwriter Justine Bateman who has complained to the US Copyright Office that the AI industry has scraped her work, much as it has everything else, having exhausted Wikipedia and Reddit it is moving on YouTube transcripts and Google docs. This is what it takes to assemble the trillions of words needed to expand the training of ever-more-powerful Large Language Models (LLMs). As a result, Bateman’s complaint has become a common charge. Authors (notably Sarah Silverman and John Grisham), publishers (Universal Music . . . [more]

In R. v. Spencer^[1] the Supreme Court of Canada held that a reasonable expectation of privacy attaches to subscriber information — the name, address, and contact information — associated with an individual Internet Protocol (IP) address. In R. v. Bykovets^[2], the majority found that reasonable expectation of privacy extends to the numbers which make up an Internet protocol address even though those numbers might be changed at random by an Internet service provider.

The Facts

The Calgary City Police were investigating fraud in online liquor sales and came across a payment processor who processed the suspect transactions. . . . [more]