40 www.lexpert.ca
Top 10 Business Decisions
WRITTEN BY AIDAN MACNAB, BERNISE CAROLINO, JASON TAN, AND ANGELICA DINO
ANGELCARE DEVELOPMENT, Edgewell
Personal Care Canada, Playtex Products,
and Angelcare Canada filed an action
for patent infringement against baby-
care-product competitor Munchkin and
Munchkin Baby Canada.
In Angelcare Development, "the Federal
Court outlined a range of infringement
and invalidity principles which provides
clarity for patent owners and IP lawyers,"
says Meehan.
Angelcare owned six valid and subsisting
patents, all relating to either diaper pail cas-
settes or assemblies between cassettes and
the diaper pails with which they are used.
Diaper pails are effectively garbage pails
for the disposal of soiled diapers, while di-
aper pail cassettes are used to store plastic
garbage bags for dirty diapers. Angelcare
did not assert but Munchkin challenged
them nonetheless for invalidity. e court
found that these claims were not invalid
for anticipation because the dispensing gap
of the 128 Patent was in a different loca-
tion than the gap in the Captiva/Diaper
Genie cassette, which was claimed to dis-
close the invention of a claim of the 128
Patent. In addition, the court found four
claims of the 384 Patent were invalid for
anticipation, and Munchkin products had
infringed several claims included in the six
patents-in-suit.
• Angelcare Development Inc. > Smart
& Biggar > François Guay, Guillaume
Lavoie Ste-Marie, Jeremy Want,
Matthew Burt, Denise Felsztyna
• Munchkin Inc. > Osler, Hoskin &
Harcourt LLP > J. Bradley White,
Vincent M. de Grandpré, Faylene A. Lunn
CLIENTS > FIRMS > LAWYERS
claimed that Munchkin directly infringed
each of its six patents by manufacturing
and selling four generations of cassettes
and two types of diaper pails. Angelcare
also said that Munchkin had induced in-
fringement by encouraging users to assem-
ble the infringing cassettes with both the
diaper pails of Munchkin and Angelcare.
Munchkin denied any infringement.
Instead, it filed a counterclaim against An-
gelcare, saying that all of its patents were
invalid on the grounds of anticipation,
obviousness, overbreadth, insufficien-
cy, lack of utility, and, in the alternative,
double-patenting.
e Federal Court found that the
claims, allegedly infringed, did not suffer
from any invalidity grounds advanced by
Munchkin. Four of the claims Angelcare
ANGELCARE DEVELOPMENT INC. ET AL. V.
MUNCHKIN, INC. ET AL., 2022 FC 507
