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This work explores the question of how professionalization of patent agency along with its accompanying discourse has affected the direction of international patent institutions and networks. Professionalization of patent agency is defined as the government regulation of who may provide patent agent services to the public through the form of professional licensing requirements. To the extent that professionalization of patent agency has created a unique discourse of patent agency, to what degree and in what respects has this discourse transformed global patent institutions? In particular, has this discourse created a form of ‘epistemic’ or ‘cultural’ capture that has the effect of delegitimizing other valid forms of discourse? Through the application of several methodologies, namely, historical analyses, doctrinal analyses and qualitative empirical work, this study attempts to create what epistemic capture theorists refer to as a capture story, which is a story of how cultural influences of a regulated industry – here, professional patent agents – come to dominate the regulatory discourse to the exclusion of other viable, competing conceptions of what constitutes the public interest. This work concludes that professionalization of agency within the patent system is interconnected with enablement as an organizing principle of the patent system as a social institution. Prior to professionalization, when agency was democratized throughout the patent system, so too was democratized enablement a guiding principle of the patent system. The formation of a unique, legitimized professional patent agent epistemic community has resulted in diminishing the democratization of enablement across the patent system as a social institution. This work discusses several of the practical and normative implications of the diminishing value of democratized enablement. Finally, this work concludes with a discussion of the future prospects of agency within the patent system.
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The Supreme Court of Canada is set to decide whether methods of medical treatment constitute patentable subject matter. The concerns surrounding extension of patent protection to methods of medical treatment, argued almost entirely on the grounds of patentable subject matter, assumes that a physician carrying out such treatment is patent infringer. Canadian jurisprudence has largely taken this assumption to be true. Interrogating the historical jurisprudence supporting the prohibition on patentability of methods of medical treatment, this article demonstrates that this jurisprudence is far from clear as to whether the issue is, or should be, approached as a question of patentability or infringement. An analysis of the case law on both patentability of methods of medical treatment, and what constitutes infringing ‘use’ of an invention, demonstrates that both lines of jurisprudence share similar concepts and underlying concerns. This has generated uncertainty as to whether the issue of extending patent protection to methods of medical treatment has ever clearly been a question of patentability. Rather, examining both lines of jurisprudence side-by-side, this piece demonstrates that concerns underlying extension of patent protection to cover methods of medical treatment have historically been categorized as scope of protection concerns, rather than patentability concerns. As such, the debate surrounding patent protection and methods of medical treatment is best characterized as an infringement issue.
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We synthesize knowledge about the policy and practices and infrastructure available for technology transfer of student inventions. Our joint consideration of intellectual property protection and business and legal support services has tried to overcome some of the traditional functional and knowledge silos.
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The first volume of the Canadian Bar Review (CBR) was published in 1923. In commemoration of the centenary of the CBR, this article briefly reflects on the journal’s history. In doing so, we highlight the CBR’s seminal role as a meeting place for scholarship, practice and legal traditions in Canada.
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