[Ip-health] Congress tries to get Israel off of US intellectual property blacklist

[James Love]

*  the US charges that Israel doesn't offer adequate protection of the
data sets used to create new drugs and doesn't provide a full five years
of patent protection for American companies to sell new drugs in Israel
before facing local competition.

Congress tries to get Israel off of US intellectual property blacklist

HILARY LEILA KRIEGER - WASHINGTON , THE JERUSALEM POST 	May. 31, 2008

Members of Congress are urging the Bush administration to remove Israel
from an intellectual property watch list that harms its international
standing and could make it harder for the country to join the
Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.

Twenty-eight senators and representatives wrote letters that Israel has
been more vigilant about copyright protection than many other countries
with less serious listings and that it has passed laws in recent years
addressing the concerns of the US Trade Representative, which drafts the
list.

"We firmly believe that this recommendation is unwarranted, and we
therefore urge you to remove Israel from the Priority Watch List and the
entire list altogether," wrote Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-Pennsylvania)
and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California). They took the lead in drafting a
recent letter to the office of the US Trade Representative, Susan
Schwab.

"This is a diplomatic black mark against Israel. As they're in
negotiations with the United States [and others] it comes up and is used
against them," said Hadar Susskind, Washington director for the Jewish
Council For Public Affairs, whose organization has been pushing the US
government to take Israel off the list and who welcomed the
congressional letters.

The USTR has so far agreed to a special review of Israel's case but
little has changed on the ground since the 2007 Priority Watch List was
released earlier this year, so it's not clear how much chance there is
of Israel's status being changed.

The report describes "significant concerns" about Israel, which finds
itself in the same tier as Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Thailand and
several South American countries. The issue for Israel, unlike many of
the other countries, isn't pirated DVDs or trademark violations, but
patent protection for pharmaceuticals. In its report, the US charges
that Israel doesn't offer adequate protection of the data sets used to
create new drugs and doesn't provide a full five years of patent
protection for American companies to sell new drugs in Israel before
facing local competition.

Israel was moved from the lower-tier Watch List in 2005, but has passed
more stringent patent protection laws in the meantime. The report noted
that the US "is encouraged by recent progress" through this legislation,
but indicated it wasn't sufficient to be taken off the list entirely.
The members of Congress, however, pointed out that the new Israeli laws
were modeled after the North American Free Trade agreement, and that
"Israel's protections far exceed the current level of protection" for
data exclusivity and patent term protection provided by many other
countries on the 2007 Priority Watch List and even on the Watch List.

Susskind called that situation "indefensible," and stressed, "Israel's
not asking for any special treatment because it's friends with the US.
It's asking for equal treatment." The USTR, though, said Israel is
judged by different standards than others in its watch list tier which
don't have as advanced economies.

"Our expectations of those countries may not be as high as they are for
Israel," said an official in the USTR, speaking on background. "We look
at Israel relative to its very high level of development."

Despite the legal improvements, he pointed to Israel's policies as the
root of the issue. "The bottom line is that we're concerned that under
current Israeli law and practices, a company that conducts testing for
pharmaceutical products gets less than five years of effective
protection," he said, referring to complicated formulas that can reduce
the patent protection timeline.

Aharon Schwartz, vice president of innovative ventures at Israeli drug
giant Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, countered that what America
demands is overly generous to US companies, to the detriment of the
local market, since it can provide many years of additional protection
before the five-year patent period begins.

Beyond the specific intricacies of the legal arrangement, Schwartz
described the demands toward Israel as "completely inequitable." He
noted that Israel had a better position on the watch list before it
enacted any of the additional protections of recent years. "Are we in a
better position that we were in 2003? We are," Schwartz said of a time
when Israel wasn't on the Priority Watch List. "What sense does [the
downgrading] make?"

The situation has lead Schwartz and several other advocates of Israel's
position to believe that the issue is Israel's competitors rather than
its own practices.

"We are a pain in the back of the major US pharmaceutical industry [so]
they're doing anything they can to apply pressure - and they're doing a
very nice job," said Schwartz, referring to his company and its growing
market presence.

The USTR official denied that his office was acting to protect the
interests of an American business from international competition. "This
is not about any one company," he said. "This is about having a strong
IPR regime that benefits countries across the board."

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