Main Page

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.

Trademark Backlog

CIPO has published two practice notices directed to the backlog of trademarks awaiting examination:

  • Requests for expedited examination – “effective immediately the Office will begin accepting requests for expedited examination of trademark applications” on the basis of court proceedings, combating counterfeit products, protect marks on online marketplaces, or to preserve claims of priority.
  • Measures to improve timeliness in examination – the Office will prioritize applications with statements of goods or services selected from the pre-approved list, issue fewer examination reports prior to refusal, and will provide fewer examples of goods or services that would be acceptable in reports.

…Read More

PM(NOC)

Proposed amendments to the Patented Medicines (Notice of Compliance) Regulations have been published for consultation in the Canada Gazette to expand the definition of a “claim for medicinial ingredient” to include salts so that “the scope of protection under the Regulations corresponds to the type of activities contemplated under the proposed amendments to the [Food and Drug Regulations]”. …Read More

Federal Court of Appeal

The Federal Court of Appeal has posted an updated COVID-19 Practice Notice relating to “deteriorating situation in some jurisdictions” placing some files back in suspension and asking that materials be filed electronically.

Budget

The 2021 federal budget released today, touches on several intellectual property matters including “$90 million over two years, starting in 2022-23, to create ElevateIP, a program to help accelerators and incubators provide start-ups with access to expert intellectual property services”, “$75 million over three years, starting in 2021-22, for the National Research Council’s Industrial Research Assistance Program to provide high-growth client firms with access to expert intellectual property services.”, deductions for certain “digital assets and intellectual property” and “Expanding loan class eligibility to include lending against intellectual property and start-up assets and expenses”.

…Read More

Copyright

The government has launched a consultation on “a Modern Copyright Framework for Online Intermediaries”, seeking comments until May 31. The consultation includes issues of intermediaries’ safe harbour protections against liability for copyright infringement, how intermediaries’ knowledge of infringement and content-related activities affect their liability as well as their attendant obligations,  remuneration of rights holders through collective licensing of their copyright-protected content on certain platforms,  transparency in rights holders’ remuneration and online uses of their content; and rights holders’ enforcement tools against intermediaries, including by way of a statutory “website-blocking” and “de-indexing” regime. …Read More

Canadian Intellectual Property