The Federal Court of Appeal has made it clear: Canada's "due care" standard for reinstating patents and patent applications is applied very strictly. In two recent cases, reinstatement was refused even where maintenance fees were missed due to junk-email filters or data-migration errors. Patent applicants/patentees, Canadian patent agents, and foreign associates should all take care to ensure that maintenance fee deadlines are not inadvertently missed to avoid accidental loss of rights.
For more information, please see our publication on the recent Federal Court of Appeal decisions here, as well as our publication on the due care standard from last year here.
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