On May 5, 2026, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) issued a preliminary redetermination on the remand of Dusome v. Canada (Attorney General), 2025 FC 1809 (“Dusome“).
In Dusome, the Federal Court had set aside CIPO’s refusal of a patent application for a method of playing poker with physical cards and for a computerized implementation of the game and remitted the application to CIPO for redetermination. CIPO subsequently released a new Practice Notice in response to the decision, eliminating the “actual invention” analytical step, removing the prohibition on patenting games, and reaffirming the physicality requirement for computer-implemented inventions.
After applying the new patentable subject matter framework, CIPO has preliminarily determined that the claims in the application remain directed to non-patentable subject matter. CIPO found that the method claims were directed to the rules of a poker game implemented using standard playing cards, which were
