Industry committee  I would agree, because most of the time, if you look at the statistics year over year in Canada, there are about five patent trials. There's a reason for that: it takes too long and it's far too costly to get to a result here. I've heard some comments that maybe our patent syst

Industry committee  We have to be persuasive through the channels we have, government to government or through international organizations, by saying, “Hey, you're not living up to your obligations.” They need to protect intellectual property of Canadians in their country, or else how can Canada ext

Industry committee  Candidly, I have to say I don't know the answer to that question. I don't know if any of the other panellists could help on that.

Industry committee  That's a good question. Obviously there are lots of good examples of patent litigation being used strategically for companies to sort out rights in complex areas. There is an ongoing battle in the smart-phone industry, just as there is when every technology changes. Think of the

Industry committee  I was struggling with whether or not cyber-security is necessarily an IP law issue. Certainly from Microsoft's perspective, we have a group called the digital crimes unit, which spends all of its time investigating these sorts of international cyber-security breaches and taking d

Industry committee  Certainly. I mentioned Japan a little while ago. I'd also point you in the direction of some of the initiatives in the United States, where the national intellectual property centre brings together people from the FBI and from CBP, the customs and border protection group. They

Industry committee  It would be very tough to know. Nortel is an easy example. You can say that there were thousands of patents and they had a huge value to other companies, but sometimes the most valuable patents are the ones where you haven't quite figured out what you have yet, and I don't know h

Industry committee  There is perhaps a nuance in there that I don't fully appreciate. I would hope that if Canada were going to sign those treaties, it would be prepared to live up to them. I think our trading partners, once we've signed those agreements, look to us to live up to them. Whether it's

Industry committee  That's tough. The way in which international agreements are negotiated is sort of beyond my comprehension most of the time, so I think I would have to defer to Professor Gold's view, which is that it would be great to have information made available as soon as possible so that pe

Industry committee  In some countries there's definitely a coordinated effort between government and industry. There could be the same sort of advertising that talked to people about wearing seat belts so long ago, which said “if you don't wear a seat belt, this can happen”. We've talked a little b

Industry committee  Well, I can't talk about numbers globally. There are estimates that put the software industry's losses to counterfeiting and piracy each year at over $60 billion. For the companies that make software, develop it, manufacture it, and distribute it, if they're not getting paid for

Industry committee  Typically, things don't come through the U.S., because they do a better job of dealing with counterfeit shipments at the border than Canada does. As is the case with Canada, in the U.S. it's hit and miss as well. There's a good example from the port in Prince Rupert, B.C. The CBS

Industry committee  Thank you for that. There are actually a lot of things we're not doing quite right, and I think our trading partners are reminding Canada of that on a regular basis, whether that's the U.S. government, whether that's the European Union in the CETA negotiation, or whether it's th

Industry committee  I have to think about that for a second.

Industry committee  Well, I'm not an expert in software patent matters, but I can say that there are many good examples of software patents being used well in industry. There's a lot of cross-licensing between different groups of companies; there are lots of instances when different companies use bo