Haunted by the Spirit of the Invention: Recent Examination Guidelines from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office for Medical Diagnostics Channel the Spectre of Contribution Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent guidelines issued by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office for the examination of medical diagnostic claims are contrary to jurisprudence. The guidelines instruct examiners to actively vary the literal wording of the claims under the aegis of a supposedly “purposive” approach that is itself at variance with the tenets of purposive construction. The guidelines indicate that examiners should identify an underlying technical problem and cast aside as purportedly “non-essential” any claim features deemed superfluous to its solution, or part of the common general knowledge. The “essential” features, thus distilled, are assessed for subject matter eligibility. The result is that diagnostic claims are now routinely objected to for being mere correlations, and are absurdly said to have no practical application. The approach is contrary to the Free World Trust, Whirlpool, and Shell Oil decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada, and to industry realities. The outcome is identical to contribution analysis.
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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 | 0.124 | 0.218 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.021 | 0.022 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".