When one talks about patents, one talks about offensive use and defensive use. It gets back to this issue of mutual destruction. If we have a patent, we can say to a competitor that if he continues doing something, we're going to sue him or make him pay us licence fees. That's an offensive use. If, however, they come after us and say that they're going to sue us, we can say that if they sue us, we're going to sue them back, because they're infringing. Had we had Canadian patents, it would not have been helpful because we were sued in the U.S.
Could we have gone back and sued our competitor in Canada? Yes, we could have. What would that have meant? Probably not much. It wouldn't have hurt them in the pocketbook. It wouldn't have hurt them much in the marketplace. The difference in patent litigation costs on both sides of the border is astronomical. It's unbelievable. We were given an estimate when we were sued in Canada that, from the time of filing through all the discovery and everything we had to produce, it probably would be about $500,000. I think our costs in the U.S. ended up exceeding $10 million.