Public Access
In Canada, all patent applications (unless they are withdrawn by the applicant) are made public eighteen months from the filing date or the priority date. The goal of public access is to give the public the ability to learn new technological information while protecting the right of the inventor to profit from the invention.
Read more about this topic: Canadian Patent Law
Famous quotes containing the words public and/or access:
“Yes; the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control over access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.”
—Jean François Lyotard (b. 1924)