Industry committee  As soon as they apply.

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  We don't play a role. The patent belongs to the entity that owns it.

Industry committee  We provide the entire timeframe, because you are going to hear about how much time it takes; that it's very long. Well, it is long because we have that five-year period in Canada, which is something that does not exist in many other countries.

Industry committee  In fact, I can tell you today. If we take out the average time for someone to request that we examine, we are at about 48 months.

Industry committee  I can do it now. It is apples and oranges, because the laws are very different. In the United States, for example, it's 39 months compared with our 48. But they have different tests of law from ours. That's why you have to take the comparisons with a grain of salt. We are sligh

Industry committee  That's a good question. The answer is quite complicated. We can probably speak off-line if you want to look at the details. I want to leave you with a few tidbits of information. One, when we grant a trademark it has a national scope. Two, official marks are trademarks that we g

Industry committee  We need to look at the details for that one, unfortunately.

Industry committee  I'm not aware of such a limitation.

Industry committee  No.

Industry committee  I'm getting into a bit of unfamiliar territory with respect to the Trade-marks Act.

Industry committee  Round tables are currently under way with business owners. We just finished one in Quebec with a business owner who had used the IP regime properly. She told us that business owners were quite apprehensive about the whole thing because it takes a lot of money and because they hav