Skip to content

CIPO Canada (CA) — national
Layer national
Jurisdiction CA (WIPO ST.3: CA)
Issuing body Canadian Intellectual Property Office (an agency of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada — ISED)
Rights administered patent, trademark, industrial_design, copyright (registers), trade_secret (statute-only, common law)
Working languages English + French (bilingual)
Connector status skipped for live registers (zero REST APIs across all rights); CanLII covers case law
Last verified 2026-05-16
Manifest entry coverage/sources.yaml CA/CanLII (CanLII cases — patent_client_agents.canlii)

Detail surveys:

Higher layers covering this office transitively:

  • EPO INPADOC (via regional/epo.md) — CA patent biblio + family
  • WIPO Madrid — international TMs designating CA (Canada acceded 2019-06-17, post-Madrid 1989)
  • WIPO Hague — international designs designating CA (Canada acceded 2018-11-05)
  • CanLII — Canadian IP case law (Federal Court / FCA / Supreme Court of Canada + TMOB + PAB)

Rating: 🔴 Red — No API

Zero REST APIs across all rights; CanLII covers case law Jump to access details → View on the atlas →

§1 Mission

CIPO is the Canadian IP office. Canada is in the IP5+ peripheral tier — modest filing volumes by global standards, but a top-tier IP system with sophisticated case law (the Federal Court is the primary IP venue; the TMOB and Patent Appeal Board handle administrative tribunals). CIPO is mid-modernization under the "Next Generation Patents" (NGP) programme, but as of 2026-05-16, no programmatic search APIs exist for any of the three registered rights.

For Canadian IP work, the recommended path is EPO INPADOC for patent biblio/family + CanLII for case law and statutes. National-only TM and design data has no proxyable substitute.

§2 What's unique here

  • CA patent prosecution status in real time (vs. INPADOC's lag)
  • CA file wrappers (national-only direct filings)
  • National-only CA trademarks (pre-Madrid-accession 2019; post-accession non-Madrid filings)
  • National-only CA designs (pre-Hague-accession 2018; post-accession non-Hague filings)
  • CIPO Patent Appeal Board (PAB) and Trademarks Opposition Board (TMOB) decisions — covered transitively via CanLII; CIPO Decisia is the upstream source

§3 Programmatic surfaces

ISED API Catalogue

The entire Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) department lists three APIs total across api.ised-isde.canada.ca. The only CIPO entry is the TM Goods & Services Manual — a Nice-class classification helper, not a record search.

Field Value
Endpoint api.ised-isde.canada.ca
CIPO APIs available TM Goods & Services Manual only
Verdict 🔴 Red — no patent/TM/design search API exists
Primary source waves/2026-05-16-registered-ip-discovery/cipo-canada.md

Canadian Patents Database (CPD) — HTML only

Public web search at ised-isde.canada.ca/cipo/patent-search. No REST. Wayback / scraping is the only programmatic path and it's brittle.

Field Value
Endpoint ised-isde.canada.ca/cipo/patent-search (HTML)
Auth none
Format HTML
Verdict 🔴 Red

Canadian Trademarks Database — HTML + undocumented POST

The only "API" surface is an undocumented internal /srch POST endpoint backing the HTML search UI. Subject to UI redesigns.

Field Value
Endpoint ised-isde.canada.ca/cipo/trademark-search (HTML); undocumented internal /srch POST
Auth none
Verdict 🔴 Red — undocumented, unsupported, brittle

Industrial Designs Database — legacy JSP

Pure legacy JSP servlet (bscSrch.do). HTML-only.

Field Value
Verdict 🔴 Red

IP Horizons bulk

Weekly ST.36 XML for patents, weekly TM XML+PNG, quarterly research CSV. Open Government Licence — Canada (OGL). Bulk-shaped; doesn't fit our zero-infra constraint but legally clean if we ever pivot to bulk ingestion.

Field Value
Endpoint CIPO IP Horizons bulk delivery
Auth none
Format ST.36 XML / TM XML+PNG / CSV
ToS Open Government Licence — Canada
Verdict 🔴 Red (bulk-shaped, not proxy-shaped)

§4 Fees

Official schedule: CIPO — Fees (ised-isde.canada.ca) Statutory basis: Patent Rules, Trademarks Regulations, Industrial Design Regulations (under the respective Acts)

Headline figures pending dedicated fee research. CIPO fees are in CAD. Canada has entity-size tiers ("standard" vs. "small entity"; small entity =≤50 employees + non-controlled by larger entity); fee reductions of 50% historically though specifics vary by category.

§5 Access via patent-client-agents

What we cover today

  • patent_client_agents.canlii (and via tools/law-tools/) — Canadian Federal Court / FCA / SCC IP rulings + TMOB + PAB decisions + Patent Act + Trademarks Act + provincial statutes; manifest entry CA/CanLII.
  • CA patent biblio + family via patent_client_agents.epo_ops (transitive).

What we should NOT add (and why)

  • Live CIPO patent / TM / design register scrapers — no stable surface; CIPO is mid-NGP migration; HTML subdomains have already migrated once (from ic.gc.ca to ised-isde.canada.ca/cipo in 2024). Scrapers will be moving targets.
  • Direct integration with the undocumented /srch POST — unsupported and unsigned.

What we should consider

  • cipo_bulkdata — IP Horizons ST.36 weekly XML + TM XML+PNG + quarterly research CSV via Shape-E catalog connector. This is bulk, not proxy, but legally clean (Open Government Licence — Canada) and well-shaped. See BACKLOG.md Tier 2 Rank 3.
  • cipo_manuals — MOPOP / TEM / IDOP single-HTML S3 mirrors via StaticLawCorpus pattern. Same shape as MPEP/TMEP. See BACKLOG Tier 2 Rank 4.

Next steps

  1. Quarterly recheck of api.ised-isde.canada.ca for any new CIPO API additions to the catalog.
  2. Watch list: CIPO NGP roadmap — public bibliographic REST API on the horizon, or staying ST.96-internal? Monitor CIPO WIPO CWS contributions.
  3. Substantive law / manuals expansion: cipo_manuals is a clean next step regardless of register modernization — adds value, no register-modernization dependency.

§6 Known unknowns

  • NGP API roadmap — will CIPO ship a public REST search API as part of NGP, or stay with the bulk + HTML model? No published timeline.
  • CanLII redistribution ToS — does CanLII permit caching detail JSON and re-exposing via our MCP tool? Confirm before scaling key usage. (Listed in BACKLOG Tier 1 open questions.)
  • TMOB / PAB Decisia coverage in CanLII — does CanLII have full coverage, or are there gaps requiring Decisia fallback?

§7 References

Primary sources only.

ISED / CIPO landing:

Search UIs (HTML only):

Bulk + open data:

Fees:

Case law:

Detail survey + wave:

Last updated 2026-05-16.