Keldeagh Lindsay is a J.D. candidate at Osgoode Hall and is taking the Patent Law course.

“In our system of patent law, the identity of the inventor is, for the most part, overshadowed by the issue of invention.” (Apotex v. Wellcome [2001] 1 F.C. 495, at para. 27)

The Patent Act does not define “inventorship”, but, as per s. 53(1) of the Act, the willful omission of the name of a co-inventor on a patent application is ground for voiding the patent. Whether two National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers should have been named as co-inventors on the anti-HIV azidothymidine (AZT) patent was litigated in Apotex v. Wellcome [2002] 4 S.C.R. 153. To resolve the issue, the Supreme Court had to divine a definition from the rest of the Act and the common law.

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Posted in Infringement, IP, Patents, Pharmaceutical Drugs
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Keldeagh Lindsay is a first year law student at Osgoode Hall and is taking the Legal Values: Challenges in Intellectual Property course.

Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR) is an amendment of the Patent Act following the 2003 WTO Decision to waive certain intellectual property rights, with the aim of providing low-cost generic pharmaceutical medicines to developing countries. Although it was enacted in May 2005, nearly four years later the legislation can count only one successful export of Canadian generics to a developing country: in 2008 a deal was struck to export two-years’ worth of generic anti-retroviral medicines to Rwanda to help combat HIV/AIDS.

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Posted in IP, IP Course Topic, Patents, Pharmaceutical Drugs
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