WTO says TRIPS permits CL, PI, price controls and patent exceptions for medical treatment methods

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

This is an offical WTO booklet for the Seattle meetings.  It 
emphasizes the areas where the TRIP is permissive regarding 
steps taken to broaden access to medical care, including:

 (a) exclusion of patents for medical treatment methods,
 (b) compulsory licensing of patents,
 (c) price controls, and 
 (d) parallel imports.

Here is an excerpt:

http://svca.wto-ministerial.org/english/book_e/stak_e_7.htm

Seattle: what's at stake? 
Resource booklet for the Seattle Ministerial Meeting

Concerns ... and responses (2) 

Do WTO rules and dispute rulings menace the environment, health,
and safety?

  [snip]


                    TRIPS and public health

The WTO agreement on trade aspects of intellectual property
protection (TRIPS) also arouses controversy, notably because of
its rules on patent protection for pharmaceuticals.

The basic argument for patent protection is that, by rewarding
inventors, it gives them the incentive to make discoveries from
which the community benefits. The costs of developing new
pharmaceutical products and bringing them to market, in terms of
the research, development, testing and certification required,
are colossal - expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars Is
now quite normal before any sales are made.

A difficult balance has to be struck between encouraging the
development of new medicines and ensuring that they are available
widely and at reasonable cost to the people who need them. The
TRIPS agreement tries to strike that balance, by requiring
20-year patent protection, but also leaving it to individual
governments to decide whether some kinds of inventions (for
instance, medical treatment methods) should be patentable, and
allowing compulsory licensing, especially to counteract
anti-competitive practices.

Moreover, the obligations of the TRIPS Agreement do not stand in
the way of price controls and similar types of measures for
pharmaceuticals.

The TRIPS Agreement explicitly states that if a country allows
parallel imports - that is, imports of goods already put on the
market in another country with the right holder's authorization -
those practices cannot be challenged under the Agreement. In
bilateral discussions between governments on this subject,
countries often invoke the TRIPS Agreement when they want to
resist requests from trading partners to limit the use of these
various forms of flexibility.

  [snip]
-- 
James Love / Director, Consumer Project on Technology
http://www.cptech.org / love@cptech.org
P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
voice 202.387.8030 / fax 202.234.5176