On August 21, 2020, the Federal Court of Canada (FCC) handed down its ruling in the appeal of Yves Choueifaty against the rejection of Canadian Patent Application No. 2,635,393 for a “Method and Systems for Provision of Anti-Benchmark Portfolio” by the Commissioner of Patents. Mr. Choueifaty was the named inventor of a computer implementation of a new method of selecting and weighing investment portfolio assets that minimize risk without impacting returns. During examination, he amended the claims twice to address the Examiner’s and Patent Appeal Board’s finding that the subject matter of the claims fell outside the definition of “invention” in the Patent Act.

In a few weeks, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance will have to either complete the sale of TikTok’s US operations to an American company (contenders have included Microsoft, Wal-Mart and Oracle, with Oracle the current favourite), or be banned from the U.S. market.