[Pharm-policy] WP Editorial: Stopping the Patent Clock

[James Love]

http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/opinion/A59539-2000Jun25.html

WP Editorial

Stopping the Patent Clock

Monday, June      26, 2000; Page A18 

NOBODY LIKES to see an established income stream stop flowing
into one's bank account, and the holders of lucrative patents are
no exception. The latest example is Columbia University, which,
realizing that its enormously profitable patent on a biological
drug-making process called "cotransformation" was about to run
out, turned to friends in Congress for an extension. The
university pleads that the income from the patent goes to
much-needed research and development and that the extension it
seeks, likely to be about 15 months, would generate an extra $70
million to $100 million for this laudable purpose. Columbia's
allies have sought to slip the extension measure first into a
stalled agriculture appropriation bill and then into a military
construction bill now in conference.


But eroding the nature of patents in this way is dangerous.
Patents are meant to balance the broad public interest in access
to new inventions with the incentive of individuals to invent.
Patents run a set period of time, usually 17 years. While they
run, patent holders can make any deals that seem best to them--as
Columbia did by licensing its process to some 12 to 14 drugs and
drawing royalties of one percent on each. Then patent holders are
supposed to relinquish rights, and let the broad market in.
Columbia isn't the first patent holder to hope Congress will help
it stave off that inevitability--the drug company Schering-Plough
has been trying for months to get similar service on its
lucrative Claritin patent. But it's a favor Congress should
resist giving.
  
=======================================================
James Love, Director           | http://www.cptech.org
Consumer Project on Technology | mailto:love@cptech.org 
P.O. Box 19367                 | voice: 1.202.387.8030
Washington, DC 20036           | fax:   1.202.234.5176
=======================================================