Patents

For many years, policy experts and others have engaged in wide-ranging debates about patents on pharmaceuticals, particularly in developing countries. On the one hand, it has been argued that IP protection provides crucial incentives to the pharmaceutical industry to undertake more research on tropical diseases. On the other hand, the patenting of pharmaceuticals has been criticised as causing challenges regarding access to medicines. The brief examines in detail the rationale for patenting medicines. The examination includes an investigation into the role of the patent system in relation to the pharmaceutical industry, the moral limits of patents, how the exclusion of a patent can create social costs, the rationale for the patenting of  medicines and the incentive theory and how this can be balanced with access to medicines.

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Patents have had an important role in organising the collaborations that led to the development and commercialization of COVID-19 vaccines. Patenting is a crucial tool in research-based industries like pharmaceuticals and biologics and can be a means to encourage collaboration. Terms can be negotiated to have different types of expertise combined in one project. The virus will likely garner another sort of PIP-type or any other similar program which will encourage contractual licensing of innovative IP in exchange for access to specialized expertise or important biological data. Monopolisation should clearly be avoided, and patent pooling must be the way forward to obtain sufficient vaccines for Covid-19 as early as possible.

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The whole world is waiting for the distribution of vaccines against COVID-19 and should be distributed to all adults globally over the next 18 months. Calls are getting louder that intellectual property rights (IPR) should be suspended to allow unfettered vaccine manufacture will mean faster access for developing countries. The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, gave tacit support this week, warning of a “catastrophic moral failure” caused by unequal access to COVID vaccines. However, IP has played a vital role in every step of vaccine research, manufacturing and distribution. The Pfizer/BioNtech partnership behind the first vaccine to be authorised in the US would not have taken place without strong IP rights.

In a competitive market, no single company will monopolise COVID vaccines or succeed in “profiteering”. A zero IP world would be a backward step and discourage companies from making urgently needed refinements to existing vaccines to combat new COVID-19 variants.

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Ending the COVID-19 pandemic requires innovation. IP is part of the solution and drives competition. IP licensing allows the innovator to control which partners manufacture the product, ensuring high quality supplies, and to maximise low-cost access for low and middle-income countries. Philip Stevens and Mark Schultz show that the reality is different from what calls for the suspension of IPRs suggest in order to keep prices low and address supply shortages. A highly competitive market in COVID-19 vaccines is unfolding right now. There is no evidence that abolishing IPRs will achieve anything more than the licensing agreements currently in place between innovators and big-name vaccine manufacturers in countries like India and Brazil; and the emergence of procurement mechanisms like COVAX. The authors demonstrate how the IP system has put us in a position to end the pandemic and why we should allow it to continue doing its job.

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The patent war of the 1850s may have been a long time ago, but it is still relevant. Adam Mossoff shows how the invention and incredible commercial success of the sewing machine is a powerful display of early American technological, commercial and legal ingenuity that heralds important empirical lessons for understanding and applying patent thievery theory today.

The Sewing Machine War demonstrated all these phenomena, including the effects of patent trolls, and proves that this is an age-old problem in patent law. The untangling of this patent thicket in the sewing machine combination of 1856, led to the first privately established patent pool. This also challenges the conventional wisdom that patent thickets are best resolved by public law rules limiting ownership of patents.

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Patents played an even more important role in 2019 to protect intellectual property. According to the latest IP5 Statistics Report, the world’s five largest IP offices granted 1.6 million patents in 2019, an increase of 5.9% on the previous year. The total number includes 2.7 million patent applications filed at the IP5 offices in 2019.

The annual patent statistics published by the European Patent Office, the Japan Patent Office, the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the China National Intellectual Property Administration and the United States Patent and Trademark Office were used for this analysis. If you are curious about the 2020 EPO statistics – they will be published in March.

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This article discusses a partnership between IEEE and ISO to fast-track some IEEE standards through ISO. Certain IEEE standards relating to Wi-Fi technologies are getting fast-tracked even though they have not gotten positive Letters of Assurance, despite this being a necessary prerequisite for ISO approval.

Looking ahead to 2021 and beyond, this webinar explores the future of technological leadership, with a focus on 5G and other emerging technologies. Panelists discuss the roles that business and government will play in building the next generation of technologies.

Topics include:

• What is 5G?
• 5g use cases: examples from the U.S. and Germany
• Challenges to using 5G
• How we can engender innovation related to 5G

When the American patent system becomes more diverse, America’s innovation economy becomes stronger and more successful. Inventors who hold patents consistently earn higher incomes than non-inventors, and businesses with patents—especially small businesses and startups owned by women and people of color—are better able to access capital, attract customers and licensees, and create jobs than businesses without IP.  Inventors, academics, industry leaders, advocacy leaders, policymakers, and other stakeholders must work together to close the patent gaps for women, people of color, and low-income individuals to help close wage and wealth gaps, strengthen the U.S. economy, and develop new and different inventions. This webinar discusses how policymakers, educators, and the private sector are working to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to invent and patent.