Industry committee  Yes. I mean, I fully agree with Chris that streamlining procedures and getting to cases is to everybody's benefit, but looking at patent law itself, if you increase, it's always a.... There are two sides of patent, right? If I'm the patent holder, I want to get as much out of it

Industry committee  Just to go back to that, when Japan changed its patent laws in 1980 they suddenly had a doubling in the number of patents. There was no more innovation, it was just....

Industry committee  We have a lot of universities patenting everything. Instead of getting one patent, they'll get three, just to meet those numbers. What I think you have to do is measure such things as where the knowledge is going. Again, it's tracking very difficult things. It goes back to the

Industry committee  Again, I'll answer in English. If you look at the accord that was done in around 1989 with the pharmaceutical industry, they promised to move us up to 10% of the revenues we invested in R and D, which would still be about half of the OECD average. They hit it for a few years, bu

Industry committee  I don't have an answer to it. I agree with you that it's a serious issue. The larger companies I think are quite aware and have put a lot of effort into IP management, but the smaller enterprises are often small technical people who come out of universities and have very little k

Industry committee  The large enterprises, especially in the IT field, are very sophisticated, and they'll have a licence. It's almost impossible to put a product on the market without violating somebody's patent. So you come up with arrangements about how you're going to do it. It's really the sm

Industry committee  Right. Innovation is not coming up with an idea. Universities come up with a lot of ideas. Canada is one of the best in the world at inventing, at coming up with ideas. What we're terrible at is turning those inventions into something you can put on the market. That's because w

Industry committee  I would move a lot of our subsidies, because they go nowhere, and reinvest them there. I know this is not Quebec, but Quebec has this 15-year exclusivity rule, which is just giving money away on pharmaceutical products rather than investing it strategically into these types of

Industry committee  We don't collect a whole bunch of information. One of the things we know is that graduate students, for example, carry a lot of knowledge from university into industry. We don't know where they go unless they become university professors. We count the number of licences and fees

Industry committee  This is an emerging literature that's really taken off in the last 20 years. Increasingly, statistical evidence shows that when you have greater levels of innovation, you get economic growth, because it enables the industry locally to use that innovation to bring down its costs o

Industry committee  A lot of judges learn on the job, so I don't want to undermine my colleagues on the bench who try, but they don't have the bigger picture. A lot of it's done through the National Judicial Institute. They've done some. I've worked with something called EINSHAC, which is based in t

Industry committee  I don't claim to have any expertise on the Investment Canada Act, but I will just follow up on Mr. Page's comment that 1992 or 1993 was the big year when most of the assets went from being physical to most of them being intellectual. In some industries it's upwards of 95%. So to

Industry committee  I'll give the example of the Amazon.com patent. I'm not commenting on whether their decision was right or not, but what the Commissioner of Patents did was to set up an expert panel to advise her on whether business methods ought to be patented in Canada and what the implications

Industry committee  We're both lawyers, so we're both right.

Industry committee  Technically, and I think Mr. Tortorice would agree, we do meet all international agreements that we have ratified. I think he was suggesting that Canada has signed but not ratified certain treaties from the World Intellectual Property Organization, which would include TPMs, etc.,