Archive for the ‘patents’ tag
Bribery or Business?
The Second Circuit is deciding whether or not the practice of “reverse payments” — settlement in patent infringement cases where the patent holder pays the alleged infringer to stay off the market — are subject to antitrust scrutiny.
Interesting concept, but my gut feeling is that the practice is anticompetitive. It’s remarkably similar to what the big tech companies did back during the dot-com boom: buy out their competitors to keep them from competing in the market. I know the issue here deals with alleged patent infringement, but the methods are almost identical.
As the article notes, the Federal Trade Commission seems to have the same opinion that I do.
[From Can Patent Holders Buy Off Infringers? Courts Take Another Look - News - ABA Journal]
A Victory Against the Rule of Law
In a decision issued Monday, 6 August, an Indian court has rejected Novartis’ patent claims on Glivec. While Doctors Without Borders (MSF) claims that this is a “major victory” for accessibility of medicines in developing countries, I believe India is the only real winner in this case. Novartis was already subsidizing the use of Glivec in India for 99% of the patients who were undergoing treatment, so access to medicine was not the real issue.
I believe that the real issue in the case is not of access to medicine, as the court states, but of expropriation of a patent from Novartis (who had been issued a patent on the new application of Glivec in 49 other states) for the benefit of India’s large generic drug industry. Given the interest of the Indian government in this case, I believe that the rule of law was set aside for the benefit of national politics.
Unfortunately, this decision will give other developing countries (poor) justification to engage in similar expropriations of foreign pharmaceutical patents (if I’m not mistaken, Brazil is attempting to do the same to an HIV-treatment drug).
Note: I have a particular interest in this case, since I argued for Novartis in a moot court exercise at Erasmus University (although in the context of a WTO decision, not of an Indian national court).
