Industry committee  I appreciate that. I won`t have to speed read. Good morning, Mr. Chair, and esteemed members of this important committee. My company is honoured that its views are being solicited on this important topic of IP in Canada. I am personally honoured to be appearing before you. Tha

Industry committee  First I'll do a little advertising. If anybody is looking for a job, we have about 170 postings on our career site right now. We're about 600 employees worldwide. About 90% of those are in Canada, the vast majority in Kitchener-Waterloo. We're soon going to be starting a small op

Industry committee  Eventually....

Industry committee  That's a question we discuss internally to some degree. Looking back on it, I think we would have been wiser in estimating the fees and costs. I don't know how you would do that, and I'm a lawyer and I'm used to doing stuff like that. Personally, I would have had more serious ta

Industry committee  John, by the way, sends his regrets. I know he would have loved to be here today. He and I talked about that yesterday. I asked him what we could have done differently. I think the only possible difference would have been if we had had some patents in our defensive portfolio. Th

Industry committee  When one talks about patents, one talks about offensive use and defensive use. It gets back to this issue of mutual destruction. If we have a patent, we can say to a competitor that if he continues doing something, we're going to sue him or make him pay us licence fees. That's an

Industry committee  In Canada, the estimate would have been about $500,000, and in the U.S. I think we ended up spending a little over $10 million.

Industry committee  That is a very difficult question to answer. Again, John and I were talking about this yesterday. He was speculating that perhaps the government could fund initial patent applications for start-ups as a concrete example. That is one way. Education, education, education. We have t

Industry committee  When the litigation started, some of the people in the company said that we should get the Canadian government to help us. We quickly learned that we were on our own. There was no such person in the Canadian system we could identify who could give us some help. I think that may b

Industry committee  The company's position is that software business method patents don't help innovation. They are used more in business wars than to truly protect something that is unique and novel. One of my favourite things about Canada is the Robertson screw. A software patent is not a Robert

Industry committee  Blackboard Inc. is still in business. Interestingly, within the last several months, they have had a layoff of about 200 people. They had been publicly traded. They went private about eight months ago, I think. Yes, they are still in business.

Industry committee  Our market share has increased. Their market share, we believe, has decreased. We used to be able to get a lot more information when they were public, of course. Now they're in the same position that we are; we're not public. Our market share has increased against Blackboard's.

Industry committee  Yes, and it was distracting for the organization. The U.S. judicial system is so dependent on depositions, documents and so forth. We had to produce all of our senior leadership at one time or another for one or more depositions. Every deposition takes time to prepare. There was

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  It would definitely be both. Let me be clear. We do not ignore the Canadian patent system or the trademark system. With trademarks, for example, it is our standard practice to file both in the U.S. and Canada at the same time, always. We want trademark protection in both places