You work for a Canadian start-up biomedical technology company (Datanos Inc.) that has developed a new machine that can do a quick brain scan of a patient and diagnose over a hundred different potential diseases based on that scan. Such diseases include various forms of brain cancer, meningitis, multiple sclerosis, ALS, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, stroke and others. Your machine’s diagnoses are 90% accurate, generally erring on the side of false negatives rather than false positives (that is, when it’s wrong, it tells you that you don’t have a disease that you do have, rather than tell you that you do have a disease you don’t have). The machine your company has devised uses own original combination of X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and ultrasound to perform the scan before being analyzed by your internally developed artificial intelligence software.

The machine on its own would be a significant step forward. Still, combined with AI it is a potentially revolutionary medical product that could help millions of people while being incredibly financially lucrative. Your AI software is quite a step forward in medical AI research and could be used with other scanning technologies beyond your own.

You want to take advantage of the law by protecting your invention and maintaining a competitive advantage to the best of your ability. While you think others might develop a similar machine within the next five years, it likely won’t be as good as yours due to the lack of your AI software. You believe the combination of your machine and the AI that powers it is as much as thirty years ahead of any competition. You have decided to call your machine “Ixchel,” after a Mayan god of health. Ixchel is therefore a brand name you also wish to protect. You note that a Canadian shoe company also has the brand name “Ix Chel”: another way of spelling the name of the same god.

You want to sell your machine to hospitals and clinics. You want to ensure that the machine is only used in a healthcare setting and that its purchasers do not try to reverse engineer any part of it or figure out how to make their own. Finally, you want to advertise it.

1. Address how each of the following legal regimes or legal instruments could be used to protect your invention, and whether and how you would take advantage of them in this situation: Copyright, Trademark, Patent, Trade Secret, Technological Protection Measures, and Standard Form Contracts.