The Honourable Roger Hughes has passed away. He was a Federal Court judge from 2005 to 20216 and a leading intellectual property author and lawyer.
The Honourable Roger Hughes has passed away. He was a Federal Court judge from 2005 to 20216 and a leading intellectual property author and lawyer.
The government has introduced Bill C-63, the “Online Harms Act” which would among other things establish a Digital Safety Commission and imposes obligations on operators of social media services to make content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor and intimate content communicated without consent inaccessible to persons in Canada in certain circumstances.
The USPTO has issued guidance on “AI-assisted inventions”. The “Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions” states that, “a natural person must have significantly contributed to each claim in a patent application or patent”. Continue reading AI Inventors
Julie L. Blackhawk, General Counsel at the Department of Justice Canada in Ottawa, was appointed a Judge of the Federal Court. Angus G. Grant, Assistant Deputy Chairperson at the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada in Toronto, was appointed a Judge of the Federal Court. Continue reading Appointments
Allyson Whyte Nowak, Senior Partner at Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP in Toronto was appointed a Judge of the Federal Court. The Honourable Elizabeth Walker and The Honourable Vanessa Rochester, judges of the Federal Court, were appointed judges of the Federal Court of Appeal. Appointments were also made today in Ontario. Continue reading Appointments
CIPO has published a “Manual of Patent Appeal Board Procedures for Rejected Patent Applications“.
In 2023, approximately 27,500 patents were granted by the Canadian Patent Office, the most since I’ve been tracking patent stats, and up substantially from a slow year in 2022 when only 18,125 were granted. Boeing was the top recipient of patents in Canada in 2023. The other top recipients were Halliburton Energy Services, Huawei Technologies, 10353744 Canada Ltd. and Qualcomm. See more for the top 20. Continue reading Patentees 2023
Thank you for another year with IPPractice! Looking back at 2023, I sent out about 490,000 emails to over 2200 subscribers. I included reports on about 150 IP-related court decisions and over 300 new IP proceedings. My most popular post was about the CIPO fee increases that came into force yesterday, January 1, 2024.
As an experiment, I have integrated my case summary feature with ChatGPT and am using the AI engine to prepare some of the case summaries. The summaries generated by ChatGPT are identified to contrast them from summaries manually prepared or prepared using non-AI tools.
My IPPractice software uses OpenAI’s API to automatically make queries with the ChatGPT model and obtain the case summaries. I welcome any feedback!
The Federal Court issued a Notice to the Parties and the Profession “The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Court Proceedings” indicating that it expects parties to declare if they have used generative AI to create documents filed with the court. A companion “Interim Principles and Guidelines on the Court’s Use of Artificial Intelligence” introduces the court’s principles relating to AI including a statement that “The Court will not use AI, and more specifically automated decision-making tools, in making its judgments and orders, without first engaging in public consultation.”