Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) has laid out a five‑year business strategy that directly affects how patents will be examined. For inventors, companies, and IP professionals, the plan signals CIPO’s intent to change. However, we will see if there are meaningful changes in pendency, quality, digital tools, and policy.  Background CIPO is the federal agency...Read More

Patent protection and design protection serve different purposes in an Intellectual Property  (IP) strategy. Although both are registered rights, they protect different aspects of a creation, have different legal tests, and follow different filing and maintenance rules. What Design Protection Covers An industrial design (Canada) or design patent (U.S.) protects the visual appearance of a...Read More

If you are steering a growing Canadian business, your first instinct is likely to look to the United States for sales or across the Pacific for manufacturing. But let’s take a look at what is already functioning right here in our own hemisphere. Under our current trade agreements, North America operates as a single, highly...Read More

On July 17, 2026, the Supreme Court of Canada released its long-awaited decision in Pharmascience Inc. v. Janssen Inc., 2026 SCC 26. In a significant ruling for pharmaceutical patentees and generic manufacturers, the Court dismissed the appeal and affirmed both the continued existence of the methods-of-medical-treatment doctrine and the validity of Janssen’s patent covering dosing...Read More

Effective July 20, 2026, the USPTO will prohibit foreign‑domiciled applicants from representing themselves in patent matters. This change applies broadly, without grandfathering based on filing date, and will require all foreign‑domiciled applicants, including Canadians, to use a registered patent practitioner, such as a Canadian patent agent with privileges before the USPTO. Definition of terms The...Read More

On 2025 October 27 the USPTO launched their Streamlined Claim Set Pilot Program, which is a way to advance your applications out of turn for examination. This program offers a predictable way to accelerate the first office action for applications with only one (1) independent claim and ten (10) or fewer claims in total, for...Read More

Canada spent billions developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) so the country has released a new strategy on how to scale and leverage the investment.  The Government of Canada’s AI for All Strategy intentionally focuses on governance, adoption, and sovereign infrastructure, but leaves out explicit intellectual property (IP) implications or statutory reforms. The overall document, while reasonable...Read More

Most people know an invention must be new, useful, and non-obvious. Obviousness or inventive step asks whether the claimed invention would have been an expected development to a skilled person in light of the prior references and products. This is an important concept in patent law that we, as IP managers in companies, had to...Read More

Patenting the invention is usually the better route, as it gives broader rights that cover your product and any other products that use the same inventive feature. Your claims ideally do cover systems, devices, components, and methods that appear in many products. Conversely, a product patent or patenting your product simply means claims directed to...Read More

The USPTO launched the Automated Pre-Examination Search Pilot Program on 2025 October 20 and it failed. They are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the patent examination workflow. Our advice was to not use it. Others agreed since only 169 applications made use of the program. So 2026 March 23, the USPTO waived the fee. Even...Read More