Canada’s New Practice on Rights Restoration Requests (4) – Experience and Lessons in Rights Restoration Requests

Four years of experience in practicing rights restoration requests under Canadian patent law

1. “Due to due care” is a high standard, and simply saying that a deadline is missed unintentionally does not explain the problem.

2. The applicant or right holder should explain in detail how to handle the official notification. Since the Late Notice is only issued when the maintenance fee has not been paid, and is interpreted by CIPO as a notification to the applicant/patentee of the official status of the application/patent, CIPO believes that the Late Notice is crucial to the decision. It's important.

3. The applicant or patentee should provide sufficient details to enable CIPO to conclude that the applicant or patentee has taken prudent actions. For example, reliance is placed on the systems used by the Firm to ensure that the necessary actions taken are robust and reliable, or that the errors that led to the failure were caused by experienced, carefully selected, trained and well-supervised staff.

4. If the rights are invalid due to multiple reasons, the applicant or patentee should clearly state their respective roles in the reasons and how each party took due care.

5. If the failure to take the necessary measures was caused by multiple errors, the specific error that ultimately led to the failure should be clearly identified, and the impact of each error on the loss of rights should be described.

6. Requests for restoration of rights should be made promptly. This will help ensure that if the reasons for replying to the "denial of EOI" are ignored, there is still time to submit a new request.