[Ip-health] VZ's Chavez: Medicine should be knowledge for the world

[peter maybarduk]

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[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]

http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN2148323120090621

Reuters: Chavez may end patents in Venezuela
Sunday, June 21, 2009

CARACAS, June 21 (Reuters) - President Hugo Chavez has vowed to shake
up the rules governing intellectual property rights on medicines and
other products in Venezuela, the socialist's latest move against the
private sector.

"A song is intellectual property, but an invention or a scientific
discovery should be knowledge for the world, especially medicine,"
Chavez said late on Saturday.

"That a laboratory does not allow us to make a medicine because they
have the patent, no, no, no," Chavez said.

Chavez, who has nationalized many Venezuela industries and is
critical of the private sector, ordered his trade minister to analyze
the patent rules in the OPEC nation.

"Patents have become a barrier to production, and we cannot allow
them to be barriers to medicine, to life, to agriculture," said the
minister, Eduardo Saman, who previously headed Venezuela's patent
agency.

"We are revising all the doctrines and laws related to patents, which
should be compatible with the international treaties that we have
signed and respect and honor."

Chavez recently criticized Swedish packaging maker Tetra Pak, saying
its patents on cartons were limiting production in Venezuela.

(Reporting by Frank Jack Daniel, editing by Vicki Allen)