General Correspondence – Patents (including Entry into the National Phase of PCT applications)

Submissions

You can electronically submit the following:

  • fee payments;
  • documents;
  • patent applications;
  • requests for national entry of an international application; or
  • other correspondence relating to applications and patents, with attached documents, if applicable, in accordance with the Patent Act and Rules.

Upon completion of the General Correspondence form (below), a letter will be automatically created for you.

If you wish to pay fees or correspond with our office using other means of communication, please refer to our Contact Us page for more information.

Documents such as assignments or the specification of the application must be provided in either TIFF or PDF format.

Sequence listings can only be provided in ASCII format. Sequence listings submitted under the Patent Rules in force prior to June 2, 2007, however, must also be provided in either TIFF or PDF format.

All further correspondence from CIPO will be sent according to your preference (e-mail or regular mail). Since e-mail is currently unsecure, when your correspondence relates to applications for patents which are not yet laid open, you may wish to indicate that future correspondence should be sent by regular mail, to provide better security for the information being transmitted. Please advise us if you change your e-mail address so that all future correspondence can be sent to you in a timely manner.

To familiarize yourself with the various aspects of a patent application and its preparation, please read the tutorial on how to write a patent application. Should you require technical assistance, please contact us or submit a Technical Problem Report form.

Note: This page cannot be used to send correspondence related to International applications. Please see the Correspondence Procedures web page for more information.

Fee payments

For questions regarding payments, please consult the page How to make a payment.

Payments may be made by credit card or by deposit account*.

System and Browser Requirements

You should review our System and Browser Requirements to ensure you have the required software.

Industry Canada registration

Before accessing any secure electronic services, you must first log on to the Industry Canada secure server. If you do not already have an Industry Canada account, you will need to create one.

To Create a new General Correspondence

To

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Problems?

Note*: Deposit Account fee payments are not debited from your account when the document transmission is confirmed. The transmittal confirmation only indicates that the submitted document has been received at CIPO; payment will be debited from your account when the service request is processed by CIPO's Finance and Administration Directorate.