NGO busts wrongful pharma patents
The Financial Times has an article on the Public Patent Foundation, set up by US attorney Dan Ravicher (who has also done some Free Software work with FSF in the past).
The foundation mainly reviews pharma patents which they believe to be bad for the public. If they find that the patent should not have been granted, they try to get it revoked.
In June, the US Patent and Trademark Office ruled that Pfizer’s patent for Lipitor, a $12bn (£6.6bn)-a-year cholesterol drug, might be invalid. Did the pharmaceutical company “get punked by a non-profit?” asked Stephen Albainy-Jenei, a patent lawyer and blogger.
The foundation is doing an important job. Public review of patents is normally minimal, and the market does not sort things out. If a big company goes after another’s patent, in the end they usually come to some sort of cross-licensing agreement. That is fine for the Top Ten, but pretty much everyone below that line is barred from using knowledge under patent protection, however wrongly that patent might have been granted.
Besides, the US Patent Office works in a way that makes it much easier for their employees to accept a patent application than to reject it. As they are constantly under pressure to reduce their considerable backlog, most likely a good number of granted patents may not be quite up to snuff. Someone should be watching this, and the Public Patent Foundation seems to do a good job there.