Actually, Mr. Chairman, I'll go first.
Good morning. My name is Michel Gérin, and I am the Executive Director of the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada. Thank you for having us today and for taking on this important study.
IPIC is the professional association of patent agents, trademark agents, and IP lawyers. Our members help Canadians obtain and protect IP rights in Canada and around the world, and they help foreign companies obtain IP rights in Canada. Our members therefore have a unique perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of the Canadian IP regime and how it compares with the regimes in other jurisdictions.
Today we want to use that knowledge to provide you with an overall list of issues affecting the IP system, and propose a framework by which the committee may wish to organize and address these issues as well as the other issues that will come up in the course of your study.
Page 3 of our presentation document contains the mandate of the committee. I will briefly address the question of innovation in the intellectual property regime, and then we'll move on to the effectiveness of the regime.
There are many definitions of “innovation”, and on page 4 we propose a simple one for the purpose of today's discussion: an idea is created, it's protected by intellectual property, and then it's commercialized.
You will notice at the bottom of that page that we have suggested some names of people and organizations that the committee may wish to speak to in the course of its study. Of course this list is by no means complete. We've proposed some throughout the document.
There are eight components to the IP regime in Canada. Today we'll focus on three: patents, trademarks, and industrial designs. These are listed on page 5. We explain to you in the following pages of the document the reasons why we have set aside the other five elements. We also provide information in case the committee wishes to investigate those further.
There are many ways of looking at the IP regime. We propose a framework that is certainly not scientific but is very much practical. On page 9 we talk about “The ABC of an effective IP regime: access, balance, control.” We've applied this ABC to our three areas of focus—patents, trademarks, and industrial designs—to identify the issues that are affecting the system. As you'll see later in the document, we've classified these issues on two scales: the level of controversy surrounding the issue and the effort required by the government to either analyze and/or implement solutions to those issues.
I'll now turn it over to Mark, who will explain further this ABC and give examples of the issues we've identified.