A recent decision of the Federal Court endorsing the position of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office is a warning to patent practitioners on communication practices with their clients. In determining whether there had been sufficient ‘due care’, it found that more was needed than sending email reminders where no responses had been received from the client.

In Taillefer v. Canada (Attorney General), 2024 FC 259, the Federal Court considered the ‘due care’ provisions of the Patent Act for the first since they are implemented in 2019. These provisions allow an applicant to reinstate a patent or patent application . . . [more]

Last year a disheartening record was set for research integrity in scholarly publishing. In 2023, over 10,000 research articles were stamped “retracted” reducing them to ghost research. The previous year the number was short of 6,000, itself a retraction record. Clearly something is amiss in the quiet halls of academe.

When a paper is marked retracted, or rather RETRACTED, on page after page, the journal’s editors and publishers have determined that it has a problem well beyond “correction” or “update.” Corrections, for example, will be issued for a number of Claudine Gay’s articles, as the former Harvard president adds . . . [more]

The Federal Court of Appeal had the opportunity to examine the implied license to use a patented article upon its unrestricted sale in Pharmascience Inc. v. Janssen Inc., 2024 FCA 10.

The issue arose since Pharmascience’s proposed paliperidone palmitate for the treatment of schizophrenia and related disorders did not offer the 75 mg-eq. dosage form which would be available from the Patentee Janssen. Janssen brought action under subsection 6(1) of the Patented Medicines (Notice of Compliance) Regulations^[1]. In that action, the respondents, Janssen sought a declaration that Pharmascience would infringe Canadian Patent No. 2,655,3.

Pharmascience defence was that . . . [more]

Were you ever scolded as a child for playing too many video games? Did your parents tell you that your Game Boy was rotting your brain or that you would never make any money playing Donkey Kong? Or (perish the thought) have you ever been the parent doling out such lectures? Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but these common reprises about video games—particularly about their earning potential—might be outdated by a decade or so. In fact, in the creator economy, video game content creators are among the highest paid. As far back as 2014, . . . [more]

Some recent court decisions have focused more attention on double patenting in Canada. Double patenting occurs when someone obtains two patents for the same (“co-terminus”) or similar (“obvious-type”) inventions. If challenged, granted patent claims can be found invalid if they are found to be double patenting over another patent owned by the applicant.

The Supreme Court of Canada has cautioned that, “If a subsequent patent issues with identical claims, there is an improper extension of the monopoly.” Many of the decisions on double patenting, including this statement from the Supreme Court arise from disputes over “old Act” patents where the . . . [more]

Dear Tri-Agency,

I was delighted to see your announcement last summer that the Tri-Agency, representing Canada’s major research funders (CHIR, NSERC, SSHRC), have decided to review your Open Access Policy on Publications. Your continuing efforts to increase the public’s ability to consult research and scholarship through this policy are admirable. Having seen your invitation for public input on the review process, I wanted to make a small contribution, as a professor of education who started a Public Knowledge Project 25 years ago to support public access to research, and as a school teacher before that . . . [more]

How far does a generic drug maker need to go to exclude liability for inducing patent infringement?

In drug patent cases the product monograph is key in assessing whether inducement exists. In the case of off-label uses, it is customary for a generic drug maker to exclude any references in the innovator’s product monograph that teach the off-label use. How far such edits must go is put in doubt by the Federal Court of Appeal decision in Apotex Inc. v. Janssen Inc., 2023 FCA 220.

The test for a finding of inducing infringement was confirmed by the Federal Court . . . [more]

A private members bill directed to a ‘right of repair’ is working its way through parliament. Bill C-244, “An Act to amend the Copyright Act (diagnosis, maintenance and repair)” is currently at third reading and may become law soon. The government included a “right of repair” in its 2023 budget documents and so far Bill C-244 has support from all parties.

The budget announcement said in part:

Budget 2023 announces that the government will work to implement a right to repair, with the aim of introducing a targeted framework for home appliances and electronics in 2024.

The government will

With OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT-3 on November 30th 2022, it very quickly became clear to people that the innocent-sounding Large Language Models (LLMs) had crossed a historic threshold when it came to the intelligence exhibited by Artificial Intelligence. Many were seeing, for the first time, a computer responding to their questions and prompts with well informed and well-formed prose that, apart from the occasional “hallucination,” spoke directly to what was asked or prompted.

The immediate legal question was whether the resulting text, while certainly exhibiting intellectual properties, constituted the sort of intellectual property that the law was intended to encourage . . . [more]

How does a Court assess a class action claim against a high-tech giant where the evidence is that the plaintiff reaffirmed the conditions of use numerous times in making her transactions in the world following the Supreme Court of Canada’s seminal case in Uber Technologies Inc. v. Heller, 2020 SCC 16, [2020] 2 S.C.R. 118.

In Heller, the Supreme Court found a compulsory arbitration clause in a contract of adhesion was unconscionable and unenforceable. The facts in that case would have required Heller to expend a year’s earnings to dispute the service agreement with Uber.

After Heller, . . . [more]

Hugh Stephens, a Canadian policy and business consultant, has a new book out In Defense of Copyright. In advance of its release, he did a column on July 15th in the Globe and Mail, “Why Canada Needs Copyright Reform Now,” calling on the government to update the Copyright Act after more than a decade of reviews and proposals. I couldn’t be more supportive of both defending and updating copyright. Now does seem to be the time, and all the more so with Prime Minister Trudeau declaring that his midsummer cabinet shake up was intended to create “the . . . [more]

In Canada (Attorney General) v. Benjamin Moore & Co., 2023 FCA 168 the Federal Court of Appeal had to assess the effort by the Federal Court to clarify the rule around subject matter objections for computer-implemented inventions. This remains a pressing issue as inventors of computerized inventions continue to seek patent protection in Canada. The Federal Court of Appeal declined to take the opportunity to clarify the rules that would be applicable because the parties and intervenors could not provide a consistent statement of the rules they thought should apply.

The background is that Benjamin Moore had been declined . . . [more]