KSR v. Teleflex. Part 1: Impact of U.S Supreme Court Patent Law on Canadian intellectual property and regulatory rights landscape.

Abstract

In KSR, SCOTUS retooled the standard for obviousness to bring it back in line with the court's previous decisions in Hotchkiss and Graham. A comparative review of the law of obviousness in the United States and Canada, and its relation to innovation and competition, was undertaken in Sections II and III. The focal point of observed differences is the inherent creativity and inventiveness of the PHOSITA, which in turn informs several binary and highly rigid aspects of Canadian patent law relevant to a statutory determination of obviousness. While American and English skilled technicians are viewed by courts in their parent jurisdictions as inherently creative and thus able to construe the prior art both implicitly and explicitly, the Canadian PHOSITA possesses not even a "mere scintilla" of inventiveness. As such, the reference point for the obviousness analysis in Canada, but not in the U.S. or U.K., is a PHOSITA who has much less than the average level of normative creativity, who is indeed no PHOSITA at all due to a de minimus level of creativity. The result in either case is removal of the PHOSITA from the obviousness determination, contrary to the provisions of Canadian patent legislation. As such, the current test for obviousness in Canada parallels in many important aspects the Federal Circuit's much maligned pre-KSR "teaching, suggestion, motivation" test that was explicitly overturned in KSR. For reasons discussed in Section III, jurisdictional differences of this nature not only have the potential to harm Canadian inventors and firms seeking to market innovative products globally, but may also, paradoxically, inhibit strong innovation by granting weak patents in the context of permissive legislation and regulations governing the approval and marketing of medical products.