For those of you who read my blog post from earlier this month on the recent flurry of international IPR guidelines announcements (see here), we thought some of you might be interested in a more in-depth look at the Canadian IPR Enforcement Guidelines written by Canadian law firm McCarthy Tétrault (for a link to their interesting article see here).

The article summarises the most notable new guidance in the Canadian guidelines – namely in relation to pharma patent litigation settlements, product switching, standard setting and SEPs and patent assertion entities. It also contains links to previous articles discussing the evolution of the guidelines. There are many parallels to ongoing IPR policy developments in Europe but a few differences also stand out (e.g. express discussion of the potential for criminal liability for pharma patent litigation settlements (not something that has reared its head in Europe… (yet?)) and a helpful distinction between so called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ product switching).