Canadian Lawyer

LEGAL REPORT/Intellectual Property Importance of IP heats up in the oil patch Patent portfolios can be a very valuable part of any small firm playing in the global fields of oil and gas. By Jennifer Brown how to make more valuable these resources which have typically been difficult to process," he says. Those smaller companies want to lock down these new and unique ways of getting at the resources because they are usually fairly vulnerable. In effect, the oil producers are leaving more of the risk in developing these technologies to the extraction and exploration companies, says Sajewycz. "In response, these service companies have been involved in a lot of intellectual property creation and because they're smaller in size, the way they protect their position is by using intellectual property." Sajewycz points to two recent patent battles involving oil and gas service companies. In Wenzel Downhole Tools Ltd. v. National-Oilwell Canada Ltd., Wenzel appealed a decision of the Federal Court dismissing its patent infringement action and allowing the defendant's counterclaim invalidating the '630 patent on the basis of "anticipation and obviousness." The patent relates to a method of increasing the offbottom load capacity of a bearing assembly used for drilling oil and gas wells. And in Corlac Inc v. Weatherford Canada Ltd., the litigation involved a patent owned by Weatherford. The '937 patent claimed an improved seal assembly combination designed to fix leaking stuffing boxes on rotary progressive cavity oil pumps. Corlac manufactures and assembles equipment used in oil production, including an environmental stuffing box used to protect www.CANADIAN L a w ye r m a g . c o m J u ly 2013 39 Jeremy Bruneel I n what was once the Wild West of intellectual property, the importance of registering and protecting patents is garnering more attention in the oil sands as companies that develop technology around extracting and locating resources in the ground realize the true value in protecting their creations. Big oil producers have always been mindful of intellectual property and the need to protect it but historically the oil companies have been more focused on producing oil and leveraging the service companies — whether it's extraction technologies or exploration technologies — to get the product out of the ground and process the raw goods. It's that push to find ways to get hard-to-reach resources out of the ground that has created a bump in patent applications over the last few years. "As resources are being depleted we're trying to make the most of what we have left and so now, in order to make the most of what we have left, you have to develop a new technology," says Mark Sajewycz, a partner and patent and trademark agent with Norton Rose Fulbright LLP in Toronto. Sajewycz works with large and small companies including a startup that created new technologies for dealing with heavy hydrocarbons — the large molecules present in oil sands. "It's been a challenge to efficiently break down these molecules into smaller useable molecules — there's been a bottleneck in the technologies focusing on

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