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Daily Intellectual Property News

Daily intellectual property news delivered to your email inbox. Over 1200 IP professionals, including lawyers in private practice, in-house counsel, law clerks and lawyers at government agencies use this daily email to keep up to date on intellectual property law developments.

Sign up to receive daily updates on intellectual property in Canada, including new IP decisions, new actions, daily activity on files you are interested in, new Patent Appeal Board decisions, new TMOB decisions, etc. Existing subscribers can manage their subscriptions to receive some or all of these alerts depending on their interest. Highlights are also available on the IPPractice.ca blog. If you are interested, you can view a sample email or subscribe. Current subscribers can modify their subscription preferences.

Patent Retriever

You can use the patent retriever to receive PDF copies by email of most patent and published patent applications from around the world, including Canadian and from the United States. You can also obtain Canadian Patent Appeal Board decisions, United States re-issue patents and United States design patents.

Federal Court docket browser

Browse the recorded entries for Canada’s Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal. While some of this information is available directly from the Courts’ websites, this browser includes links to related proceedings, reported decisions, and links to the intellectual property at issue.

Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal hearings

A list of intellectual property hearings this week in the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal, as well as all scheduled intellectual property trials, judicial reviews (including PM(NOC) hearings), and appeals to the Federal Court of Appeal.

Patent and Trademark Statistics

Various statistics on patents and trademarks in Canada, including rankings of agents in Canada by volume of applications, and old act patents.

Litigation Statistics

Investigate litigation before the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal, including lists of all intellectual properties actions in the courts and the status of the actions.

Budget

The government released its Budget 2024 that includes some IP related provisions:

support for amendments to the Copyright Act to “help achieve interoperability between devices and equipment” and “to allow the circumvention of digital locks to diagnose, maintain, or repair a product”;
for the Federal Court, funds to “enhance its capacity to deliver translated decisions” by the federal courts; and consultations on “repealing the residency requirement” for Federal Court judges allow for wider and more diverse pool of applicants;
support for various innovation programs including $600m over four years for enhancements to the SR&ED program; money for the Innovation Asset Collective; and allowing “businesses to
immediately write off the full cost of investments in patents”.

CIPO Waiver

The Rules Amending the Patent Rules that amend s3 and add s139.1 to the Patent Rules to allow the Commissioner to waive payments of fee differences in certain circumstances (see earlier post) have been published in the Canada Gazette, Part II.

CIPO Waiver

As mentioned last week, CIPO waived underpayments on $50 small entity fees which should have been increased under the Service Fee Act. Corresponding Rules Amending the Patent Rules amend s3 and add s139.1 to allow the Commissioner to waive payments of fee differences in certain circumstances, are now available.

Federal Court

The Federal Courts Rules Committee announced a “global review” of the Rules and invited comments on several identified proposals, as well as any other proposals for changes to the Rules by July 2nd. Some of the proposals include updates on electronic service and filing, incorporating elements from the consolidated practice notices, and expand roles of associate judges.

CIPO Waiver

CIPO has issued a practice notice waiving the requirement to pay difference between the amounts paid for certain $50 small entity maintenance fees up to today and the amount actually required as increased by the Service Fee Act because of incorrect information posted by CIPO. Accompanying amendments to the Patent Rules that came into force earlier this week address situations where fees are paid incorrectly as a result of erroneous information provided by the Commissioner of Patents.

Canadian Intellectual Property