A 'patent' is a government grant that gives the inventor—as well as their heirs, executors, and assignees—the exclusive right within Canada to make, use, and/or sell the claimed invention during the term of the patent, subject to adjudication.
The test for novelty is whether or not a single, publicly disclosed example of prior art "contained all of the information which, for practical purposes, is needed to produce the claimed invention without the exercise of any inventive skill".
[5] This may include prior patents, publications or the invention itself being put on display.
Disclosures in a private document, such as an internal memo that is not available to the public, do not count.
[9] 28.3 The subject-matter defined by a claim in an application for a patent in Canada must be subject-matter that would not have been obvious on the claim date to a person skilled in the art or science to which it pertains, having regard to In Apotex Inc. v. Sanofi‑Synthelabo Canada Inc., the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed the test for non-obviousness laid out in the 1985 English case of Windsurfing International Inc. v. Tabur Marine (Great Britain) Ltd.:[10] For a product to have utility it must perform some useful function.
[2] Some things that cannot be patented include:[2] The list of prohibited matters notably differs from the United States.
[15] In Canada, since 1 October 1989,[16] generally speaking, patents are granted to the first inventor to file an application for an invention (that is, Canada has a "first-to-file" system), which may result in a "race to the patent office" by inventors of competing technologies[5][17] In some cases, an application may effectively receive an earlier filing date, to improve the chances of an applicant winning the "race to the patent office".
[citation needed] In Canada, inventors have one year (i.e., a "grace period") after their first public disclosure of their invention in which to file a Canadian patent application.
As of 26 June , 1970, Canada has been bound by the provisions of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).