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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.

Decisions

The Federal Court issued a Notice to the Profession (link) regarding the publication of court decisions. The notice replaces the notice of June 2015 which had said that non-precedential decisions would not be published on the Federal Court website. The new notice, which came into force June 1, says that final decisions, if contested, along with interlocutory decisions considered by the Court to have precedential value, will be published on the website, and additional decisions published to CanLII. If you know of an interesting IP decision, please let me know!

Industrial Designs

As part of implementation of the Hague Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Industrial Designs, CIPO has published a proposed amended Industrial Design Office Practice Manual (IDOP) for consultation. The Practice Notice indicates that the consultation is open until June 29th with a view to the regulations coming into force date in late 2018.

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INTA

I’m looking forward to catching up with friends and colleagues at INTA. Let me know if you are also going to be in Seattle.

Appointments

Alexandra Steele, a lawyer at ROBIC LLP practicing intellectual property law, has been appointed as a Prothonotary of the Federal Court, replacing Prothonotary Richard Morneau who has elected to retire May 15.  Appointments were also made today to the courts in Alberta and British Columbia. …Read More

Happy World IP Day

A number of interesting announcements on World IP Day. The focus of the international focus on IP was on Powering change: Women in innovation and creativity. In Canada, the government announced a National IP Strategy having a number of components including $85.3 million over five years to help Canadian businesses, creators, entrepreneurs and innovators understand, protect and access IP. Announced for IP tools, was more efficient dispute resolution and tariff setting at the Federal Court (more judges) and Copyright Board through more funding, formation of a patent collective, improvements to IP used in standards-setting processes, and an IP-specific marketplace. Announced legislative changes include:

  • establishing minimum requirements for patent demand letters;
  • excluding settlement demands from the copyright Notice and Notice regime;
  • Requiring ‘use’ of a trademark to enforce it within the first three years;
  • affirming the patent research exemption;
  • clarifying the role of standard essential patents;
  • allowing continued use of IP by licensees in liquidation proceedings; and
  • creating a College of Patent and Trademark Agents to regulate agents.

In Europe, the UK announced today that it had ratified the Unified Patent Court (UPC) Agreement.

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Canadian Intellectual Property