So far, because of the way our litigation system works, there's not as large an incentive, as there is in the United States, to come here. The fact that the U.S. has jury trials is really the most anti-foreign IP rule the U.S. has, because juries will naturally side with their own. It makes it very difficult.
RIM faced this. There's no way RIM should have lost. They did, partially because of the jury system. The U.S. patent system is unfair to foreigners in a way that ours isn't, because we have a much more regularized system.
Having said that, when universities come out with poor-quality, vaguely worded patents, they probably won't stand up. The only people wanting them will be trolls, who will use them to assert against a small Canadian firm—or any other firm— in a demand for money. They never want to go to court, but the SMEs don't have the resources, the hospitals don't have the resources. We saw this around gene patents, for which we had U.S. firms asserting patents in Canada that probably are invalid. They were invalidated in the United States, but nobody here.... A hospital is not going to spend $3 million from the health care system to defend.
That's really where the problem is. We need to stop these poor-quality patents getting through. Partially that's the patent office's responsibility, but they're under-resourced; they don't have enough time. Getting the universities not to apply for them is a good first step.