Bibliographic record
Abstract
In its Sildenafil decision, the Supreme Court of Canada held Pfizer’s Viagra patent to be invalid for failure to disclose “the invention,” though it provided no explicit definition of that term. I argue that on the best reading of the decision, “the invention” means the new, useful, non-obvious contribution to knowledge which is disclosed in the patent. While this is initially attractive, I argue that on this definition, a duty to disclose the invention is unsound as a matter of law and policy, because it implies that if any important claim in a patent is invalid, all the claims will be invalid. This eviscerates Section 58 of the Patent Act, which provides that claims stand or fall independently. I argue that the Court’s reasoning was motivated by a mistaken belief that at the time of the application Pfizer had tested the other claimed compounds and knew them to be ineffective in treating ED, and that it claimed those compounds primarily to conceal the true invention. I argue that even if the Court’s understanding of the facts was correct, a duty to disclose the invention is not the appropriate tool to address the issue. The case properly raises questions relating to the duty of good faith disclosure, not a duty to disclose the invention.
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 | 0.033 | 0.066 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.034 | 0.035 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
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".