Canadian Software Businesses Should Consider Patents Despite CIPO's Misleading Messages

As part of the government of Canada's IP strategy, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) is making laudable efforts to educate the Canadian public about tools for protecting intellectual property assets. Unfortunately, some of these efforts may discourage Canadian innovators from using patents to protect patent-worthy software innovations.

A patent one-pager provided by CIPO at a recent symposium for entrepreneurs explained that "[s]oftware is considered a literary work and cannot generally be protected with a patent". CIPO's online guide to patents includes similar messages about the patentability of computer programs. However, these messages may be giving Canadian inventors the wrong impression that software innovations are not patentable. While the code used to generate computer programs may be a literary work protectable by copyright, many software innovations are nonetheless patentable in Canada and elsewhere.