Egin Kongoli is an IP Innovation Clinic Fellow and a 3L JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. This article was written as a requirement for Prof. Pina D’Agostino’s IP Intensive program.

When I was first assigned a utility provider as my placement for the Intellectual Property Law and Technology Intensive, I thought, “What does providing electricity have to do with intellectual property?” As I quickly learned, businesses that haven’t traditionally dealt with IP rights are facing a rising tide of related challenges as they seek to capitalize on new opportunities. Intellectual property directly supports Alectra Utility Corporation’s evolution from a distributor of electricity to a springboard for greater opportunities for their customers. While Alectra’s traditional role as a service provider still makes up most of its business, the provides new incentives to support innovative research and development. My internship at Alectra was spent on, among other things, the ongoing development of an intellectual property strategy to capture more value from the utility’s emerging collaborative business, along with consideration of its institutional business.

Reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 requires a significant transformation of Ontario’s energy system. As a utility provider serving over a million Ontarians, Alectra is poised at the forefront of this project. Through the Green Energy & Technology Centre (GRE&T Centre), Alectra cultivates innovation by identifying, evaluating, and accelerating emerging clean-energy solutions. The work is cutting-edge, like 2021’s GridExchange Pilot, a transactive, blockchain-backed energy platform and marketplace. Through GridExchange, customers with energy assets like solar panels, battery storage, or electric vehicles can receive compensation and rewards for managing their energy use, such as . From municipalities to start-ups, many are eager to access utility data so that they might develop other innovative solutions. Proper strategy, governance, processes, policies and contracts are needed to ensure any IP creation resulting from the collaboration and any real upside potential can be shared with Alectra.

IP strategy determines a standard for how rights-based issues will be handled in the collaborative environment. Canadian universities have paved the way in this regard. Like Alectra, these institutions aim to serve the public interest through the fruits of intellectual inquiry by enabling and encouraging research and development. University IP policies vary, but they all grapple with similar legal issues such as disclosure, use, ownership, commercialization, and revenue sharing. As third-party members working with Alectra and the GRE&T Centre receive data alongside meaningful learning and experience, using personal information by third parties will require careful consideration of not just legal obligations but also Alectra’s reputation. Current privacy legislation dictates that corporations must obtain valid consent from the individual to collect, use or disclose their personal information. At the same time, the federal government’s newly proposed Bill C-27, the Consumer Privacy Protection Act, weaves a web of exceptions to regulated practices that obfuscates oversight. For example, the CPPA excludes “anonymized data” from its purview, regardless of the ongoing debate on whether data can ever be de-identified without a remaining risk of re-identification. However, the proposed legislation permits the de-identification of data and the use of this material without the requisite knowledge or consent of the customer if the disclosure is made for “a socially beneficial purpose,” including the “protection of the environment.” By way of example, if Alectra or another utility discloses data to develop clean-energy infrastructure or energy-saving services, would it be excluded as a socially beneficial purpose? If a business anonymizes and aggregates its data sets, does this mean such disclosures are excluded entirely from regulatory oversight? Personal information must not be collected or used to influence an individual’s behaviour or decisions, but what if such a purpose is an alleged “socially beneficial” one?

My time at Alectra was illuminating. The work was not only related to intellectual property law but was also challenging and required endless inquiry to understand the nuanced interplay of laws and a business’s interests. From privacy to protecting against misappropriation, data practices demand multiple layers of legal and operational consideration. Whether through an NDA or an employment contract, a business’s dealings must reflect its IP strategy. Collaborative agreements must delineate contributions made by the company and benefits shared back. As , contractual measures must be taken to protect the data, but cannot be so strict as to dissuade collaboration. These challenges, and others unnamed here, offer exciting opportunities for lawyers working in the utility space as intellectual property law continues to fuel innovation.

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Experiential education was one of the main reasons I decided to pursue legal studies at Osgoode. Over the past few months, I was lucky to be placed at two very different organizations as part of the IP and Technology Intensive Program. One of my placements was at Alectra Utilities, a large utilities company that serves approximately one million homes and businesses in Ontario. My other placement was at the BEST Lab, a unique initiative at �첥��Ƶ for fostering entrepreneurship in students from Lassonde School of Engineering.

During my virtual placement at Alectra, I continued an IP audit started by the previous year’s intern. This involved updating Alectra’s record of registered trademarks using information from external legal counsel. My unique contributions to the audit included drafting memoranda for departments, requesting information that could be helpful to Alectra in trademark opposition and expungement proceedings. I also updated a “Document Log” for the legal team, which is a record of contracts that have IP-related provisions. While reviewing the contracts that I added to the Document Log, I learned a lot about Alectra’s business strategy and its projects piloted by the Green Energy & Technology Centre (GRE&T Centre), the company’s innovation hub. My work at Alectra also included providing feedback on IP-related practices, based on my observations in meetings with GRE&T Centre teams. This open-ended task was a great opportunity for me to apply my legal education and lessons from prior work experiences in a context with real stakes. Alectra is in early stages of developing a robust IP strategy and I was excited to provide a few pointers on IP commercialization. Before my internship ended, I also made sure to ask questions to the in-house counsel about their careers, to have a better understanding of the challenges of their roles.

The BEST Lab may be a smaller organization than Alectra, but it certainly did not lack in interesting work. One of my deliverables for the BEST Lab was hosting weekly drop-in sessions to answer IP-related questions from BEST Lab members. Through these sessions, I met one member who had a fascinating technology and a plan to build a new company. Based on one of their requests, I prepared a video resource for the BEST Lab that describes important elements of IP licensing agreements. Another task I completed at the BEST Lab was drafting their membership agreement and code of conduct, using precedents provided by my supervisors. As part of this assignment, I suggested clauses based on my understanding of the BEST Lab’s operations and goals. My most interesting assignment at the BEST Lab was researching potential solutions to an IP issue in a new program that will soon be launched at the BEST Lab.

�첥��Ƶ is one of the very few universities in North America that allow students to retain IP they create at school. This means that York’s engineering students retain IP in prototypes they create for their final-year Capstone group projects. An IP ownership issue arises where some students in a Capstone group wish to start a business with their Capstone IP, but some group members do not. All Capstone group members are co-inventors with title to the Capstone IP. Without being assigned the title, interest, and rights of the inventors who are not co-founding the startup, it could be extremely risky to build a business because the non-participating inventors may sell their title to a competitor or make demands for exorbitant compensation after the business is launched. After conducting online research and reaching out to representatives from organizations/initiatives similar to the BEST Lab, I concluded that the most elegant solution may be to facilitate negotiations between the inventors for an IP assignment agreement by providing critical information such as industry standards for compensation structures/amounts.

Despite having to work in a virtual environment during the current pandemic, I am grateful for the experiential education from my internships which cannot be substituted by conventional classroom teaching. If you are a 1L or 2L student interested in the IP field, the IP and Technology Intensive Program is an opportunity you do not want to miss.

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Tianchu Gao is an IPilogue Writer and a 1L JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School.

Rising to the challenges and opportunities posed by the disruptive technology of artificial intelligence, �첥��Ƶ’s Artificial Intelligence and Society Task Force leveraged collegial expertise from a wide range of disciplines to explore the possibility of research, development, and innovation of artificial intelligence and its impacts on humanity and society. The Task Force, Co-Chaired by Prof. Pina D’Agostino and Prof. James Elder, hosted a virtual symposium “” on Nov. 16. The summarizes current AI research, teaching, and learning activities at York and offers advice on further expansion of AI-related initiatives in the near future. After welcoming remarks from York’s President & Vice-Chancellor Rhonda Lenton, VPRI Amir Asif, and Mayor Frank Scarpitti of Markham, the symposium featured a keynote speech by , Head of JP Morgan Chase AI Research and Herbert A. Simon University Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. It was followed by a panel discussion led by Prof. D’Agostino and Prof. Elder. The panel featured Dr. Veloso, Neetika Sathe (Vice President, Alectra’s GRE&T Centre), James Goel (Director of Engineering Technical Standards, Qualcomm) and Androu Waheeb (JD Candidate 2023, Osgoode Hall Law School). The livestream of the complete symposium is now available on .

Artificial intelligence is “.” Professor Veloso began her speech by tracing the origin of AI to a ten-man workshop that lasted two months at Dartmouth College in 1956. The workshop proceeded based on the conjecture that The workshop’s goal to simulate human perception and cognition on machines continues to challenge scientists today. Despite the revolutionary breakthroughs in the past decades, artificial intelligence is still a young science that has a long journey to advance ahead.

Professor Veloso shared in the speech a few projects she and her team have developed for JP Morgan Chase when she worked as the head of its AI Research department since 2018. One example is the use of image-based decision making and prediction in stock market analysis. Machines have learned to recognize and classify objects; we see the implementation of this technology in self-driving cars, as the car needs to “see” the environment—identify roads, cars, and pedestrians—to navigate in the traffic safely. Similarly, this technology is used to analyze the stock market as pure images. The researchers labeled the images with “buy” and “no buy” decisions made by humans from historical data, and they can use visual signals to predict transactions in the stock market with 95% accuracy.

Other important tasks that AI can tackle for the financial market include the generation of synthetic data for development and exploration. Synthetic data is easier to access and process than real data. It allows banks to explore the impacts of the decisions they made and develop new approaches to problems like fraud and money laundering. Professor Veloso’s team is also working on the automated standardization of financial data represented in different formats. It is an AI-driven task because the computer program needs to recognize visual and semantic cues in order to understand the meaning of a document and convert it into the standard form. These are a few examples of the various tasks that AI can accomplish and continuously refine for the financial market and beyond.

The challenges AI poses for us do not concern technology alone. As panelist James Goel pointed out, the tremendous investments (nearly a trillion dollars) that AI-related markets will attract in the next five to ten years will generate transformative impacts on society at large. The question remains: what could academia and government policy do in response to this social challenge?

�첥��Ƶ is taking the initiative to foster an interdisciplinary approach to explore AI as a key area of accelerated research and its social implications. The report by the Task Force is a first step of the journey; it studies the existing AI terrain in York in terms of research, teaching, and learning activities and offers guidance on how to grow AI initiatives in the university. York’s new Markham campus will further provide greater resources for AI-related research and innovation. Substantial activities suggest that York has a great potential to be a great center of teaching and research in AI.

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Ashley Moniz is the Managing Editor of the IPilogue and the Assistant Director of IP Osgoode.

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On October 15, 2008, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto, IP Osgoode was officially launched. Known as Osgoode Hall Law School’s Intellectual Property Law and Technology Program, Prof. Pina D’Agostino set out to create a program that would lead IP law discourse, foster a vibrant community whose members are welcome to share broad perspectives, and diversify the IP innovation ecosystem. Now, 13 years later, IP Osgoode and the IP Innovation Clinic are still forging new paths and relationships in the IP community.

Here are a few noteworthy accomplishments from the past year:

IP Osgoode

• Runners-Up at the Oxford IP Moot: in March 2021, for the first time. Under Prof. D’Agostino and Prof. David Vaver’s academic supervision and expert coaching from lawyers at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP and Deeth Williams Wall LLP, our team placed second after an incredible showing and very close competition, winning the Kirkland & Ellis Runner-Up Prize for Oral Proceedings in the process.
• Leading Legal Disruption Published: in May 2021, . The book, titled Leading Legal Disruption: Artificial Intelligence and a Toolkit for Lawyers and the Law, was co-edited by Dr. Aviv Gaon of IDC Herzliya and Carole Piovesan of INQ Law.
• Two Bracing for Impact Webinars: IP Osgoode collaborated with the Harry Radzyner Law School at the IDC Herzliya and Microsoft Canada to present two new webinars in our Bracing for Impact Event Series: “” in and “” in , the latter being also in collaboration with Alectra’s GRE&T Centre. The webinars featured speakers from around the world and drew in almost 250 spectators between them.
• First Virtual Trademark Hearing: thanks to the Honourable Justice Michael Manson of the Federal Court of Canada, over 70 Osgoode students and faculty members virtually attended the .
• IPilogue’s Return to Daily Publishing: under a new structure, the has returned to publishing daily blog articles written by our dedicated team of IPilogue Writers. Almost 270 articles have been published over the past year alone, more than 120 more than the previous year. We continue to receive and publish guest submissions from students, academics, lawyers, and members of our as well.

IP Innovation Clinic

• IP Innovation ChatBot Launched: The IP Innovation Clinic officially launched its through a . Developed with assistance and support from Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP, CIPO, and ISED Canada, the AI-backed ChatBot provides accurate and reliable IP law information for free on our website. Thanks to further funding from ISED through the National IP Strategy, we look forward to continuing to expand the breadth of the ChatBot’s impact and better reach and assist members of underrepresented communities in the IP Innovation ecosystem.
• Mitacs-funded Business Strategy Internships: in March 2021, . The IP Innovation Clinic placed 3 Clinic Fellows with businesses pivoting their operations in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Prof. D’Agostino was also featured in the marking the official launch of the program.
• Clinic Clients Secured Millions in Funding: two IP Innovation Clinic clients leveraged IP information from our Clinic Fellows to massive expansions of their business. to develop their drone technology and for their sustainable clothing brand.
• First LPP Candidate: during the Winter 2021 Term, under the supervision of IP Osgoode alumnus Reshika Dhir of Bereskin & Parr LLP, the IP Innovation Clinic . We look forward to welcoming two new LPP candidates in Winter 2022.
• The IP Lunch Club Continues: for the second year in a row, and in collaboration with the City of Barrie Sandbox Centre, Prof. D’Agostino’s Directed Reading: IP Innovation Program students presented , educating local entrepreneurs and innovators about registering and commercializing IP rights. Many attendees from these webinars go on to engage the IP Innovation Clinic for IP and commercialization assistance.

As always, we are grateful to all of the students, faculty, partners, and our Advisory Board for making this past year as great a success as it was. None of the above accomplishments would have happened if not for their passion, dedication, and hard work. As we welcome new students and continue to seek out more involvement, we look forward to another wonderful year and welcome new students and partnerships who can help us grow to even greater heights.

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Photo Credit: Ashley Moniz

Ali Mesbahian is an IPilogue Writer and a 2L JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School.

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On June 28, 2021, IP Osgoode hosted a panel discussion in their Bracing for Impact Webinar Series titled AI’s Dirty Footprint. Organized in collaboration with the Harry Radzyner Law School at IDC Herzliya in Israel, Microsoft Canada, and Alectra's GRE&T Centre, the central question of this webinar was: in what way can we use artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure that the negative impacts of its energy consumption do not exceed its beneficial effects for environmental sustainability?

IP Osgoode’s own Professor Giuseppina (Pina) D’Agostino opened the panel by setting the stage for the discussion and introducing the speakers.��

In his opening remarks, Dr. Amir Asif, Vice President of Research and Innovation at �첥��Ƶ, noted that AI remains a “key strategic area” for research at York. Emphasizing the need for an interdisciplinary approach, Dr. Asif also stated that exploring AI’s ethical and legal implications will require collaboration between researchers in the AI community, social sciences, and the humanities.

Indeed, “collaboration” was one common thread among all the speakers. In his first formal address since he took office, the Hon. David Piccini—Ontario Minister of the Environment, Conservation and Parks—turned not only to universities for ideas in using AI to improve the climate situation, but also to youth as part of the government’s broader environmental policy plan. The youth, he noted, must be “unapologetically engaged”. Given the , the Minister’s words are welcome if they signal any change.

The panel then proceeded to a discussion moderated by Dr. Aviv Gaon, professor at IDC Herzliya. In his introduction, Gaon brought attention to that outlines 17 internationally-agreed-upon sustainable development goals for 2030, spread across 169 targets. With respect to the environment, the study shows that AI’s potential to enable the environmental targets of these 17 goals outweighs its inhibitory effects.

The first panelist was Andrea Roszell, Director of Energy, Sustainability and Infrastructure at Guidehouse. Her discussion was centred on AI’s capabilities to increase efficiency in the energy and utility sector. In particular, she pointed to the “energy cloud”, a concept developed at Guidehouse that moves away from a “one-way flow” of power from energy centers to consumers, to a more networked, interconnected “multi-flow” dynamic. This requires an infrastructure—a neural grid—that utilizes artificial intelligence in technology, such as sensors software and monitoring systems, to create large “data sets” for utilities to access. Despite requiring increased energy consumption, Roszell stated that these data sets are a net benefit to the environment due to the new efficiency gained in management of greenhouse gases and predictive maintenance models that ultimately lead to a more sustainable and reliant energy infrastructure.

The second panelist was Dr. Audrey Lee, Senior Director of Energy Strategy at Microsoft. She started by pointing to Among other goals, Dr. Lee highlighted Microsoft’s plan to offset all of its electricity usage with renewable energy by 2025 and to be carbon negative by 2050. Lee noted, however, that the first step in achieving any such goal is to establish a proficient “measurement infrastructure” that can enable us to quantify our environmental footprint with sufficient precision—for example, data analytics that detail how and to what extent a particular utility uses electricity at each hour.

The panel then continued to its third speaker, Kapil Singhal, Co-Founder & CEO of Vyntelligence. At the very outset of his discussion, he too emphasized the need for collaboration. In particular, Singhal noted how Vyntelligence has made possible a new form collaboration between artificial intelligence and human brain power. Utilizing short videos of workflow in the field, artificial intelligence can augment workers’ awareness of a given project by revealing further areas of risk and benefit. This, when combined with human cognitive and decision-making power (which Singhal noted far exceeds what AI can learn), will yield more efficient outcomes. One such outcome is enhancing the infrastructure that allows for remote work (the importance of which is vividly felt in times of COVID-19), reducing thereby the carbon footprint of work-related travel.��

Finally, the panel featured Neetika Sathe, Vice President of the GRE&T Centre at Alectra Inc. First, she noted that as more and more people gain access to the internet, global energy consumption is bound to increase. Thus, she emphasized the need for international collaboration beyond local efforts. She further mentioned that about half of the energy used at datacentres is used to cool their servers, which brings attention to the need for more efficient infrastructures.

In closing, it is important to address that, as the panelists mentioned, data centres account for only 1-2% of global energy consumption. However, as I mentioned in , AI’s “dirty footprint” is not confined to the energy it consumes, but extends to its ability to offer services for resource extraction which, for example, is enabled by the connection and collaboration between the tech and fossil fuel industries. Any meaningful policy directed at reducing AI’s negative environmental impacts must also account for this broader perspective.

A link to watch a recording of the event can be found on IP Osgoode's page.

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