On 14th June, Stern Kessler Goldstein & Fox published an article saying that, legal or not, the cannabis industry is booming. It says that analysts have projected that in North America alone it will grow from $9.2 billion in 2017 to $47.3 billion in 2027. Despite marijuana’s illegal status in most countries, the patent arms race for cannabis has already begun. Patent applications has more than doubled in the past decade, with over 10,000 such applications filed since 1978, roughly 6,000 of which were filed after 2008. The period from 2015 to 2017 saw the greatest increase in cannabis application filings, reaching an all-time high of 118 applications filed in 2017 alone. Cannabis-related patents have been issued in other jurisdictions, among them Canada, the EU and Israel, and 7 of Canada’s top 10 cannabis-patent holders are multi-national pharmaceutical companies.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/global-patent-prosecution-june-2019-97192/
