Pharmaceutical Pirates

[ebacon]

Originally Posted by BeamOn

How Long Is A Drug Patent Good For?

http://www.drugsdb.com/blog/how-long...-good-for.html

After reading, this still do not know why their patent is still effective.

BeamOn,

All utility patents have the same duration (the legal word is "term"). It matters not whether the invention is mechanical, medical, etc.

There are time adjustments available on the patent term and they are called, appropriately, patent term adjustments. Patent term adjustments are a fairly new development in American patent law and were instituted in part due to the substantial value of pharmaceutical patents, i.e. every day matters. Still, patent term adjustments are fairly small in the scale of time.

The bigger issue is a legal dance, or tug of war, between two competing ideologies. On one side is the concept of a monopoly for the patent holders. We want to reward them for their contributions to society. On the other side is the concept of market competition. We want consumers to have choice.

Anti-trust law stands as a referee between those two forces. That is the narrow area of law that this drug situation lives in. I suspect that it will be a test case for the latest splinter to get smoothed out of existing law. The tree is strong.

We would do better to stand back and look at the tree instead. But that would be quiet. And quiet can be discomforting.

I digress. Again.

[Dondilion]

This guy has put Big Pharma on the defensive.

The AIDS/HIV community has powerful friends.