Intellectual Property: Canada

Canada Ranks Dept: What Canada needs at this critical juncture is a conversation about how to generate more economic impacts from innovation and creativity. As we look at our patent, copyright and other intellectual property rules, for example, how much protection do we actually need? How much is enough to create the right incentives, and how much is too much? Is our venture capital market good enough? Are our courts well equipped to deal with intellectual property matters?, according to Globe and Mail. How do we get there? That question is harder because developing innovation and creativity depends on more than copyright or patent laws. In his recent book That Used To be Us , Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Friedman suggests that there are five pillars to support innovation-based growth. I think he got it mostly right and are Canadians simply less creative and innovative than other countries? Should we see ourselves as consumers and users of the creativity of others? Exactly the opposite is true. Canada has a vibrant community of writers, songwriters, filmmakers, to name just a few. Canada ranks among the very top countries in published scientific articles per capita. Yet Canada also ranks much lower on the global innovation scale. Why? In short because Canadians have ideas, but many of them do not know how to exploit them and the policy environment is not well structured to support them. The aim is clear and simple: Canada needs a policy machinery that is dynamic and responsive and generates more, not less, homegrown creativity and innovation. Canada s future economic growth depends on developing natural resources and agriculture but also and perhaps more than anything else on launching new ideas and new business models to implement them think online games, high technology, and green technology . Even in agriculture, forestry and the exploitation of Canada s vast natural resources, the real value added that will grow the economy will come not primarily from the land but from the way Canadians exploit it and use new technologies to produce, extract and transform the resource sustainably. That is what a good, well-calibrated intellectual property policy would do. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.