Annual Report 2005-06 of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) today released its annual report for the fiscal year 2005-2006.

Entitled Moving forward strategically, the report describes the activities of the Office's various branches: Trade-marks Opposition Board, Patent Branch, Patent Appeal Board, and Copyright and Industrial Design Branch.

Among the more interesting highlights I picked up about the activities of our federal Crown agency in charge of intellectual property matters:

• CIPO is expanding its range of electronic databases, launching the Industrial Designs Database last year and making its Trade-marks, Patents and Copyright databases more user-friendly
• the Office has created a number of online tutorials to help visitors to the site in using the Trade-marks and Patent databases
• Proctor & Gamble made the most trade-mark applications in 2005-2006: 252
• The top copyright applicant was Pearson Education Canada, with 376 applications
• The top industrial design applicant was Microsoft at 213 followed by Nike at 211
• Research in Motion, the company that makes the Crackberry (sorry, I mean the Blackberry) filed the greatest number of patent applications: 376
• 40044 patent applications were filed. 5348 applicants were residents of Canada; 2698 were from Germany; 2571 from Japan; 1517 from the UK; 1475 from France; 1393 from Switzerland; 574 from the Netherlands. The greatest number of patent applications were from US residents, at 19121