Bibliographic record
Abstract
The emergence of the “promise of the patent” doctrine is an important recent development in Canadian patent law, which primarily impacts pharmaceutical patents. The doctrine holds that if the specification sets out an explicit “promise,” the utility requirement will be satisfied only if the claimed invention delivers on that promise. In practice, the promise of the patent, as set out in the disclosure, is now almost invariably the standard for assessing utility of a pharmaceutical patent. The result is that a patent may be held invalid for lack of utility, notwithstanding that the disclosed invention has sufficient utility to support a valid patent. This article shows that the doctrine originated in English law at a time when the grant of the patent was a discretionary exercise of the royal prerogative, so that the Crown might properly refuse to grant a patent even though it would be upheld by the courts if granted. Consequently, the patent was granted on the basis of all representations made by the applicant, and the promise of the patent doctrine reflected an unwillingness of the courts to second-guess the Crown in the exercise of its prerogative. This article argues that the doctrine is inconsistent with the Canadian Patent Act, under which an applicant is entitled to a patent as a matter of right if the invention satisfies the statutory criteria.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".