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.
Hughes
The Honourable Roger Hughes has passed away. He was a Federal Court judge from 2005 to 20216 and a leading intellectual property author and lawyer.
Online Harms Act
The government has introduced Bill C-63, the “Online Harms Act” which would among other things establish a Digital Safety Commission and imposes obligations on operators of social media services to make content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor and intimate content communicated without consent inaccessible to persons in Canada in certain circumstances.
AI Inventors
The USPTO has issued guidance on “AI-assisted inventions”. The “Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions” states that, “a natural person must have significantly contributed to each claim in a patent application or patent”. Continue reading AI Inventors
Appointments
Julie L. Blackhawk, General Counsel at the Department of Justice Canada in Ottawa, was appointed a Judge of the Federal Court. Angus G. Grant, Assistant Deputy Chairperson at the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada in Toronto, was appointed a Judge of the Federal Court. Continue reading Appointments
Appointments
Allyson Whyte Nowak, Senior Partner at Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP in Toronto was appointed a Judge of the Federal Court. The Honourable Elizabeth Walker and The Honourable Vanessa Rochester, judges of the Federal Court, were appointed judges of the Federal Court of Appeal. Appointments were also made today in Ontario. Continue reading Appointments
PAB
CIPO has published a “Manual of Patent Appeal Board Procedures for Rejected Patent Applications“.
Patentees 2023
In 2023, approximately 27,500 patents were granted by the Canadian Patent Office, the most since I’ve been tracking patent stats, and up substantially from a slow year in 2022 when only 18,125 were granted. Boeing was the top recipient of patents in Canada in 2023. The other top recipients were Halliburton Energy Services, Huawei Technologies, 10353744 Canada Ltd. and Qualcomm. See more for the top 20. Continue reading Patentees 2023
Happy New Year
Thank you for another year with IPPractice! Looking back at 2023, I sent out about 490,000 emails to over 2200 subscribers. I included reports on about 150 IP-related court decisions and over 300 new IP proceedings. My most popular post was about the CIPO fee increases that came into force yesterday, January 1, 2024.
ChatGPT
As an experiment, I have integrated my case summary feature with ChatGPT and am using the AI engine to prepare some of the case summaries. The summaries generated by ChatGPT are identified to contrast them from summaries manually prepared or prepared using non-AI tools.
My IPPractice software uses OpenAI’s API to automatically make queries with the ChatGPT model and obtain the case summaries. I welcome any feedback!