Great. I will walk you through the various clauses related to division 7, clauses 187 to 302. They're all related to Canada's national intellectual property strategy. I'll try to walk you through each act as we go.
By a very quick way of background, budget 2017 committed the government to creating a comprehensive national intellectual property strategy within one year. Budget 2018 then provided $85 million, with $10 million ongoing for a number of programs and services related to that intellectual property strategy, and similarly committed to making amendments to the various intellectual property statutes to try to ensure that it was preventing any undue barriers to innovation and also encouraging and attracting investment and an efficient and fair economy.
I'll start with part 4, division 7, subdivision A, which is clauses 187 to 213. They relate to the Patent Act. The changes to the Patent Act essentially relate to five specific measures. The first is to establish minimum requirements for patent demand letters, to allow the recipients to assess the merits of the claims. This essentially ensures that any recipient of a patent demand letter will have sufficient information to be able to make an appropriate adjudication of its merits.
The second is to allow the court to admit patent examination history, sometimes called file wrappers, as evidence to prevent patent owners from taking different positions during litigation than that which they took before the office. The third is to codify the common law patent research exception. The fourth is to modernize prior user rights to ensure that a subsequently patented invention doesn't require a business to cease operations.
Finally, the last is to require subsequent patent owners to honour licensing commitments made by previous owners to standard-setting organizations when incorporating patented technologies into standards. This is sometimes called standard essential patents, and this simply ensures that the negotiated agreements reached between a standard essential patent owner and its users continue even when there's a transfer of ownership.
I'll pause on the Patent Act changes because that's subdivision A, and I can take any questions on that before I move to subdivision B.