Canada’s <agent> element

In the two previous posts we saw that the <agent> element in the USPTO’s bibliographic data identifies the “attorney, agent or firm” for a US patent by name only.  No address information is provided—not even a country identifier—so it’s impossible to discriminate between different offices of the same firm solely by reference to the bibliographic data.

We also saw that the rep-type attribute of the <agent> element in the USPTO’s bibliographic data is populated as rep-type="attorney", without regard to the practitioner’s registration classification (i.e. attorney vs. agent).

How does Canada’s patent bibliographic data compare with the USPTO’s data in relation to the <agent> element and its rep-type attribute?

US 8332851

The previous posts considered this <agents> element extract from the USPTO’s XML publication for United States Patent No. 8332851.







CA 2699332

Another earlier post considered extracts from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office’s XML publication for pending Canadian patent application serial no. 2699332.  Here is the <agents> element portion of the CIPO’s XML publication for the ‘332 application.

Comparing the <agent> elements of US 8332851 and CA 2699332 reveals:

• the US element has a sequence="01" attribute, whereas the CA element has a sequence="0" attribute;
• the US element has a rep-type="attorney" attribute, whereas the CA element has a rep-type="agent" attribute;
• the US element has an <orgname></orgname> tag pair encapsulating the firm name “Fish & Richardson P.C.”, whereas the CA element has a <name></name> tag pair encapsulating the firm name “Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP”;
• the US element has an <address><country></country></address> tag pair encapsulating the word “unknown”, whereas in the CA element that tag pair encapsulates the country code “CA”.

I will leave the sequence attribute to a future post.

Recall that the rep-type attribute in the USPTO’s bibliographic data is populated as rep-type="attorney", without regard to the practitioner’s registration classification (i.e. attorney vs. agent).  Does the rep-type="agent" attribute in the CA element shown here mean that the CIPO’s bibliographic data reflects the practitioner’s registration classification (i.e. lawyer vs. agent) for a particular Canadian patent?  Let’s explore.

I ran this simple SQL query against a database I constructed from the CIPO’s XML bibliographic data for Canadian patent documents published during the decade spanning 2001-2011.  The query says “show me the rep-type attribute for every practitioner record in the database, but ignore records with rep-type='agent' ”.  The query returned zero rows.  Therefore, every practitioner record in the database has rep-type="agent". That is not surprising—all patent practitioners who become qualified to practice before the CIPO are registered as agents, irrespective of whether they also happen to be lawyers admitted to practice in one or more Canadian provinces.  Indeed, many—but not all—registered Canadian patent agents are also duly admitted to practice law in one or more Canadian provinces.  There is no such thing as a registered Canadian patent attorney and therefore there are no occurrences of rep-type='attorney' (or anything besides rep-type='agent') in any of the CIPO’s XML documents.

Now consider the “CA” country code encapsulated by the <address><country></country></address> tag pair.  I ran another simple SQL query—shown here—against the database mentioned in the previous paragraph.  The query says “show me the country code for every practitioner address record in the database, but ignore records for which the country code is 'CA' ”.  The query returned zero rows.  Therefore, every practitioner address record in the database has the 'CA' country code.

It can thus be seen that the <agent> element in the CIPO’s bibliographic data has the same limitations as the <agent> element in the USPTO’s bibliographic data.  The IP firm responsible for a particular Canadian patent or application is identified by name only—no address information for the firm is provided—so it’s impossible to discriminate between different offices of the same firm, solely by reference to the bibliographic data.