CIPO has opened consultations on proposed fees for various steps under upcoming amended Patent and Trademark rules. These steps include fees per Nice Classifications and renewal fees for trademarks and correction, after-allowance amendments and late fees for patents. The consultation is open until July 5, 2016.
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Patents and Competition
My recent column on the Canadian Competition Bureau’s new Intellectual Property Enforcement Guidelines, patent pooling, PAEs and standard-essential-patents as applied to tech patents, was published earlier this month.
Agents
The Canadian Intellectual Property Office has announced consultations on the regulatory framework for patent and trademark agents.
Town Hall
At the Federal Court’s annual town hall held on May 12, 2016, the court provided an update and made some new announcements, including new Case Management Guidelines for NOC Applications.
Patent Volume in 2015
The number of patent applications published in 2015 or that entered national phase in Canada in 2015 was approximately the same as in 2014 at about 33,500 application. Smart & Biggar, Gowlings and BLG top the list of firms by volume of applications.
IPEGs
The Competition Bureau has released updated Intellectual Property Enforcement Guidelines. The guidelines are directed to the Bureau’s approach to investigating anti-competitive activities relating to intellectual property including settlements, particularly in PM(NOC) proceedings, price-fixing, patent pooling, product switching, patent assertion entities and standard essential patents.
Design Remedies
The United States Supreme Court has granted cert in Apple v. Samsung on the question of the apportionment of the infringers profits for design infringement.
NAFTA Proceeding
Nine entities have filed amicus curiae applications in Eli Lilly’s NAFTA arbitration proceeding relating to the ‘promise doctrine’. The entities include industry associations, and academics.
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.
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.