Industry committee  That a decision is made. You could withdraw your patent at some point.

Industry committee  With patent pending, no. I think all you're doing is indicating to the market that you have something playing in that area, and what it does, basically, is it gets your competitors to pay attention to it. They want to make sure that if I'm building something that is pretty much

Industry committee  From that perspective, yes.

Industry committee  Correct. There are other situations, for example in the health industries and the pharmaceutical area, where there's a synchronization that has to happen with the allocation of your patent and certification with the health agencies. They may require more time to process a paten

Industry committee  I'll be really quick, then. With respect to percentages of university holdings and whatnot, in terms of applications for this past year, three or four universities are among the top 20 applicants, and they probably totalled in number close to 70 applications out of the 36,000.

Industry committee  I'll take a crack at that one. We have basically two types of applicants. We have those who are represented by a professional IP agent—who is typically a lawyer with an engineering background, if it's in the patent world—and we have unrepresented applicants. If you do hire a l

Industry committee  Actually, what I said was that we have different tests that are based in law that we have to conduct. The law doesn't state that we take 49 months and they take 38.

Industry committee  Different, not necessarily more, but different. We look at things differently than they do, and the amount of time it takes to process an application is also probably a whole lot more dependent on the administration, on how many people you have going through the applications. I

Industry committee  You have to understand that the business folks who make the application also make the decision to wait. Clearly, in their business and their industry, it's beneficial to wait. It's not necessarily an impediment. There is a reason for that to happen. It could be that you may have

Industry committee  Since 2004.

Industry committee  First of all, CIPO is not a department. We're an agency of the Department of Industry. We are 100% user-fee based. I don't have a government appropriation.

Industry committee  They are set, yes. We go through Parliament to raise our fees. We are also a revolving fund, meaning that the fees are set so that we can, for a period of a few years, accumulate net income where at some point the costs will exceed the revenue. It's planned that way. We will burn

Industry committee  That is correct.

Industry committee  We have the resources. Not doing the survey was not a question of not having the resources. It was more a question of the fact that we wanted to concentrate on the innovators with our round tables and get direct face-to-face information from them. We're not ruling out the possib

Industry committee  We take copious notes. Yes.