Canada’s patent term adjustment (PTA) regime is now a practical post-grant issue for patent owners. The Canadian Intellectual Property Office has opened the route for requesting additional patent term where statutory conditions are met, including for patents granted after 1 December 2025. Because the request period is generally tied to a three-month deadline from grant, the first wave of deadline management will become visible in March 2026.The change deserves attention, but not every Canadian patent will justify a PTA request. Owners should first check whether the relevant delay is...

Canada’s latest public signals on generative AI and copyright are no longer just about labelling synthetic content. The direction is broader: platforms are being pushed away from a pure notice-and-takedown posture and toward a framework built on prior authorisation, transparency and a more defensible approach to remuneration. Across the 2025 copyright consultation summary and the 2026 Canadian Heritage committee report, the same point keeps resurfacing: creators’ ability to consent, be credited and be paid cannot simply dissolve because AI systems scale faster than copyright administration...

During the 68th Series of Meetings of the WIPO Assemblies, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) announced a five-year renewal of its Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) arrangement with the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA). The renewal preserves a work-sharing route under which eligible applicants may rely on favourable examination results from one office to request accelerated processing before the other. CIPO also signed new cooperation work plans with the European Union Intellectual Property Office, the Norwegian Industrial Property Office and France’s...

Trademark costs are moving up again in two important common-law jurisdictions, and the 2026 changes in the United Kingdom and Canada deserve closer attention than a simple fee table comparison. The UK Intellectual Property Office has confirmed that, from 1 April 2026, the online fee for filing a trade mark application will rise from £170 to £205, while the renewal fee will increase from £200 to £245. In Canada, the current CIPO official fee schedule shows that, from 1 January 2026, several trademark-related fees increased under the annual adjustment mechanism, including the online...

Canada’s response to trademark squatting is becoming more operational. CIPO has recently articulated a more detailed practice approach to “bad faith,” spelling out the kinds of facts the TMOB is prepared to weigh in opposition and invalidity proceedings and making the analysis less abstract than it used to be.The point is not that every broad or aggressive filing will now be branded abusive. The point is that a few recurring patterns are being brought into clearer focus: large-scale filings for marks identical or highly similar to well-known foreign brands, the absence of a genuine...

For applicants entering Canada from the PCT route with an AI system listed as the sole inventor in the international phase, CIPO’s current national-phase guidance, compliance framework and the latest Canadian inventorship position now point in the same direction. A pure AI inventor designation is not going to carry a case smoothly into Canada. If inventor details, entitlement statements or applicant status do not line up with what Canadian law requires, the file is likely to run into a compliance notice before anything else moves very far.The practical importance of this development is...

Update (24 September 2026): CIPO launched the Key Technology Expedited Program (KTEP) pilot on 2 September 2026 (see our report of 5 September); implementation details for the fee-based Track 1 route have not yet been published. As CIPO's public consultation on faster patent examination approaches its June 23 close, the Canadian system is starting to show a much clearer shape. The existing green-technology fast lane is not being displaced. Instead, it has become the reference point for a broader redesign that now puts 2 additional pathways into sharper focus: a fee-based Track 1 ultra-fast...

Canada’s patentability analysis for AI and computer-implemented inventions is moving into a markedly less forgiving phase. CIPO’s March 2026 Practice Notice put the spotlight squarely on the “physicality” requirement implicit in subsection 27(8) and section 2 of the Patent Act: if a claim merely has a computer process an abstract algorithm in a well-known way, without a discernible physical effect, physical change, or an improvement in the functioning of the computer itself, eligibility risk rises quickly.By late June, practitioner feedback suggests that this is no longer just a policy...

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) formally launched its Key Technology Expedited Program (KTEP) on September 2, 2026, with the first pilot stream focused on critical minerals innovation. Eligible patent applications covering areas such as mining extraction, mineral processing, battery-material innovation and refining technologies may enter the accelerated queue without an additional expedited-examination fee. CIPO says applications accepted into the stream are expected to receive a First Office Action within about seven months.The practical value is not simply faster...

On September 11, 2026, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) updated its Next Generation Patents (NGP) service notice to address cases where delays in processing voluntary amendments led examiners to issue reports based on outdated claims. Under the temporary policy, CIPO has relaxed the conditions for withdrawing an examiner’s report where the relevant amendment was received more than 30 days before the report date. Applicants must make the request in writing before filing a response, or no later than the response deadline, and CIPO will assess requests case by case. The agency...

CIPO has scheduled MyCIPO Patents downtime for 17 September 2026, from 07:00 to 09:00 Eastern Time, and an extended window on 20 September, from 00:30 to 18:00. In Madrid, these periods run from 13:00 to 15:00 on 17 September and from 06:30 on 20 September to midnight at the start of 21 September. At this morning’s check on 17 September, access problems affecting the Canadian Patents Database remained listed as ongoing because of illegitimate automated traffic. A separate portal outage on 16 September was marked resolved.A service interruption does not itself suspend filing deadlines: CIPO...

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) issued Information Notice No. 41/2026 (MADRID/2026/41) on 23 September: the Government of Canada has notified the WIPO Director General of a declaration modifying the amounts of the individual fee payable in respect of Canada under Article 8(7) of the Madrid Protocol. The new amounts apply as from 1 January 2027: for an international application or subsequent designation designating Canada, 291 Swiss francs for one class of goods or services instead of 282, and 88 Swiss francs for each additional class instead of 86; for renewal, 353 Swiss...