Industry committee  Good morning, honourable members. Thank you for inviting me to this standing committee meeting. I've read over the years many reports on commercialization and intellectual property protection. It's actually refreshing to be invited to this kind of format to give you a perspectiv

Industry committee  I would echo some of the comments that Gay just made. The U.S. offers a very informal patent filing process. It's called a U.S. provisional patent. It's very cheap. You don't need to spend a lot of dollars with patent agents to formally structure the patent in the claims that mig

Industry committee  The only jurisdiction in the world that allows pure software patents is the U.S., and they have fallen into disfavour. They're very expensive to prosecute as well. Software is primarily protected through copyright. You keep your source code secret. You don't let people see how y

Industry committee  We operate in this pre-commercialization space; so programs of support for de-risking the technology and prototypes.... Quite often you get an idea and then you've got to build a box with some flashing lights and make it look like a product and de-risk it to the point that somebo

Industry committee  I could make a comment on that. I don't know if I would personally support including patenting as part of the tenure process, because what invariably happens is you'll drive what I call vanity patents—people trying to file patents for the sake of having patents. I think a patent

Industry committee  Because the stuff in the university that we see is very early, there is quite often a requirement to package it—at least to build the first prototype to validate that the technology works, to de-risk to the point that somebody will open up a chequebook and buy something, so that

Industry committee  To comment on that, in the U.S. there are actually quite a few murmurings about whether the Bayh-Dole Act has outlived its useful purpose. There was a recent court case, Stanford v. Roche, where the university's claim to ownership of an inventor's IP was challenged. It has caused

Industry committee  It was 55% less in Ontario compared to similar U.S. jurisdictions. Canadian companies invest in patenting 55% less than their U.S. competitors do.

Industry committee  Right. The number of patents is broadly viewed as a measure of the innovation capacity of industy. It says that the Canadian private sector is not investing heavily in the patent space, and, therefore, it's a reflection of innovative capacity. There's a notion there again that un

Industry committee  You know, there's—

Industry committee  I would echo some of the same comments just made. If you look at the open source movement, for instance, there are no patents there. In fact, that community rails against patent protection and constraints on moving knowledge. There certainly are models of intellectual property be

Industry committee  Again, it depends. In the software community, moving fast is really the important thing. Having an open system, open source, works in that space. In industries where you have to make capital investments, such as chemical processing or manufacturing, where there's heavy equipment,

Industry committee  The U.S. filing is basically just a place holder.

Industry committee  It's a place holder. Even Canadian corporations would likely file in the U.S. first, because for Canadian corporations the biggest market in the world is the U.S. So there would be a filing in the U.S. for a variety of technical reasons. If the filing starts there, there are cert

Industry committee  Yes. There are some patent-related laws and precedents that drive people to file in the U.S. first, but it in no way precludes our filing in Canada at the appropriate juncture in the future. It's just a place holder.