Patent Act

The claim is compared with other inventions to determine whether the invention has already been anticipated. The test is whether a previous claim "contained all of the information which, for practical purposes, is needed to produce the claimed invention without the exercise of any inventive skill". The previous invention must be described in a single document that is generally available to the public.

A patent will give the inventor and its assignees the exclusive right to the construction, use and sale of the invention. There are number of matters that cannot be patented. Among such matters include certain new plant matters, computer programs, and medical treatments. The novelty of an invention is determined based on the construction of the claim. The court shall read the claim constructively.

The requirement for utility originates from the definition of invention as a "new and useful art" The requirement is generally easy to meet, however, it does limit the scope of protection by excluding methods that would not be useful. The test for a non-obvious invention is whether an "unimaginative skilled technician, in light of his general knowledge and the literature and information on the subject available to him on that date, would have been led directly and without difficulty to [the] invention."

The Patent Act is the Canadian Act of Parliament that governs the patent law in Canada.