SCC grants leave on Google injunction

On Thursday, the Supreme Court of Canada granted leave to appeal in the case of Google Inc. v. Equustek Solutions Inc., et. al, an appeal from a British Columbia Court of Appeal decision, in which a broad worldwide injunction was granted restraining Google, a non-party to the action, from including the defendants’ websites in Google’s search results.

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Patents

A couple of items from last week that may be of interest:

  • The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in an en banc decision, held in Lexmark v. Impression held that when a product is sold with limitations on re-sale or use restrictions, this restriction prevents exhaustion of patent rights with respect to downstream sales in breach of those restrictions.
  • CIPPIC and the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy at McGill University have jointly sought amicus curae status in Eli Lilly’s NAFTA arbitration relating to the ‘promise doctrine’. They have published their application and their submissions.
  • Threading the biosimilar needle: Patent lawyers walk a fine line between dosage regimes and medical treatment“, an article by my colleagues, Geoff Mowatt and Nik Purcell, was published in The Lawyers Weekly.
  • My article, “Summary Resolution of Intellectual Property Cases“, was published last week in Slaw. It focuses on the 2009 summary trial and summary judgment amendments to the Federal Courts Rules and their application to IP cases.

Canadian Trademark Firms in 2015

About 53,000 trademark applications were filed in Canada in 2015. Of these, about 22% were filed in-house or without an agent (about the same as in the last couple of years). Gowlings, Bereskin & Parr and Smart & Biggar were the firms that filed the most trademark applications. Check out my list of the 50 firms/agents that filed the most applications in 2015.

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Top Patentees

BlackBerry tops the list once again for receiving the most Canadian patents in the past year, obtaining almost twice as many patents as the second place applicant. The others in the top five for 2015 were Qualcomm, Halliburton Energy Services, General Electric and Schlumberger. Approximately 21,000 Canadian patents were granted last year to approximately 9000 applicants. Continue reading Top Patentees

SCC and Technological Neutrality

The Supreme Court of Canada released an important ruling today on the role of technological neutrality in copyright law. In a 7-2 split decision in Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Société Radio-Canada v. SODRAC 2003 Inc., et al., Justice Rothstein writing for the majority affirmed the principle of technological neutrality and held that royalties must be paid for ephemeral copies of works made by broadcasters for the purpose of facilitating broadcasting. However the majority also remanded a determination of the value of the licenses for those copyrights to the Copyright Board in order to take into account technological neutrality. A strong dissent by Justice Abella (agreed to in part by Justice Karakatsanis) disagreed that copyright applied to ephemeral copies, at all.
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Canadian Intellectual Property