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 as I can, but people who are doing follow-on research, improving it, making it better, and who are often better positioned to actually put a product on the market, can be negatively affected if the patent right is just too long or too broad.
So there's always a compromise. In the last dozen years in the United States, we've seen the Supreme Court pulling back and giving more rights to users. For example, the big pharmaceutical company Merck was able to do research on an anti-cancer drug, free of having to worry about the patent, because of a decision in the U.S.
So every time you give more rights to the current patent holders, it's the next generation of innovator that suffers. That's point number one.
The second point just goes back to the cross-border issue. The ideal situation is that Canadian companies have infinite patent rights in the United States and Europe, and no patent rights here, because that would give us the market. We sell it and we get to do whatever we want here. Obviously it's not realistic, but we have to understand that the pull is being driven by U.S. markets, and Canadian law has to have at least subtleties to allow the research and development of it without being overly constrained. So if you go too far, you have an opportunity to constrain innovation.
