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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 Bill

The budget implementation bill, C-19 received royal assent yesterday. It includes some IP-related changes:

  • measures directed to the term of copyright including “6. Except as otherwise expressly provided by this Act, the term for which copyright subsists is the life of the author, the remainder of the calendar year in which the author dies, and a period of 70 years following the end of that calendar year” (Division 16);
  • changes to the College of Patent Agents and Trademark Agents Act (Division 17); and
  • replaces the term “Prothonotary” with “Associate Judge” for the Federal Court (Division 22).

Patent Decision

The Federal Court issued public reasons for judgment in Rovi Guides v. Videotron, 2022 FC 874. The Court found the four asserted patents invalid for being obvious and/or anticipated and accepted non-infringement defences advanced by the defendant, Videotron. If there had been liability, the Court concluded that the Plaintiff would not have been entitled to an accounting of profits and a design-around cost would have been a reasonable upper bound for any royalty. Videotron was represented by a team from DLA Piper including Bruce Stratton, Alan Macek, Michal Kasprowicz, Gabriella Levkov and Nicole Nazareth.

…Read More

Private Member Bills

The following private member bills were introduced on Friday:

  • C-292 “Online Algorithm Transparency Act” directed to ensuring that algorithms used for “moderating content … do not result in adverse differential treatment of any individual or group of individuals based on one or more prohibited ground of discrimination”
  • C-294 “An Act to amend the Copyright Act (interoperability)” directed to expanding the interoperability exception in 41.12 to devices in which software is embedded and to products used to provide interoperability.

Privacy and AI

Bill C-27, “Digital Charter Implementation Act, 2022”, was introduced yesterday that would

  • enact the “Consumer Privacy Protection Act” directed to the use of personal information, replacing portions of PIPEDA.
  • establish a tribunal for hearing appeals of decision made by the Privacy Commissioner and impose penalties.
  • enact the “Artificial Intelligence and Data Act” regulating the use of artificial intelligent systems, particularly those with a ‘high-impact’.

…Read More

Copyright Board

Proposed Rules of Practice and Procedure for the Copyright Board have been published for consultation.  The rules address notices of grounds within 7 days of filing a tariff proposal, joint notices of issues, case management, electronic documents and interveners, and would apply to new and existing proceedings.

Canadian Intellectual Property