India’s booming $26 billion generic drug industry and public health sector rejoiced over the Indian Supreme Court’s recent decision to reject a patent filed by the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Novartis for their landmark leukemia drug, Gleevec. Novartis received a patent for an earlier variation of Gleevec in 40 countries including Russia, China, and Taiwan. However, India’s troubled IP regime applies an ambiguous standard to patentability, the so-called “enhanced efficacy” for new forms of known substances. India only applies their “efficacy” requirement to the chemical and pharmaceutical drug industry as a protectionist measure. India codified the efficacy requirement in section 3(d) of their patent code and this may contravene with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) as set forth by the World Trade Organization (WTO).

In the Novartis decision, the Indian Supreme court asserted that the legislative history of India’s patent code wanted to prevent evergreening. Evergreening is when patents are granted due to incremental changes to known substances. According to the Indian Supreme Court, evergreening allows, “[a] trifling change [to be] made to an existing product, and claimed as a new invention” (Novartis AG vs. Union of India and Others, Supreme Court of India, Civil Appeal Nos. 2706-2716 of 201, 1 April 2013, pg. 55).

Yesterday the United States Supreme Court issued a truly regrettable decision in the much anticipated copyright case Golan v. Holder.  At issue in this case was nothing short of whether the United States Congress has the authority to restore copyrights in works that were in the public domain, or in other words whether Congress has the authority to strip works from the public domain and grant copyright protection.  In one of the more intellectual dishonest decisions I have ever read, the U.S. Supreme Court, per Justice Ginsburg, determined that Congress can pretty much do whatever it is that they want with respect to copyrights.  Removing works from the public domain and restoring copyright protection is said to be a power granted to the Congress under the Constitution, and there are no legitimate First Amendment concerns.

To all those who can read the Constitution it has to be clear that the Supreme Court’s decision in Golan v. Holder is absurd.  It is a ridiculous decision that lacks intellectual honesty and defies common sense.  Further, the facts of this case provide ample ground for the suspicions of many who wonder why it is that the United States is so interested in losing its identity and compromising Constitutional principles in order to facilitate some ill conceived plan to join the world community.  Simply stated, treaties and international law cannot trump the Constitution.  With all due respect to the six Justices who ruled in favor of stripping works from the public domain, the Constitution does not support this decision and any attempts to argue to the contrary are insulting and show a contemptuous understanding of the history and role of intellectual property in America.

U.S. Supreme Court Building

Earlier this week the United States Supreme Court granted the petition for a writ of certiorari filed by lawyers from Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project (FUP) and Wheeler Trigg O’Donnell LLP and will review the constitutionality of a federal statute that removed thousands of foreign works from the Public Domain and placed them under copyright protection. The case presents a two-pronged constitutional challenge to the 1994 law passed by Congress, which amended the Copyright Act. The case will test whether Congress has the authority to remove works from the Public Domain under the “Intellectual Property Clause” of the United States Constitution and whether the 1994 law violates the First Amendment rights of those who performed, adapted, restored and distributed works which had previously been in the Public Domain.

The Fair Use Project filed the petition in October, 2010 on behalf of orchestra conductors, educators, performers, film archivists and motion picture distributors who relied for years on the free availability of works in the Public Domain, which they performed, adapted, restored and distributed. The 1994 amendment to the Copyright Act, the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) (see copyright highlights of URAA), removed these works and many others from the Public Domain and placed them under copyright protection in conjunction with the implementation of international intellectual property treaties. That amendment affected the copyright status of thousands of works by foreign authors that had previously fallen into the Public Domain in the United States.

Francis Gurry, WIPO Director General at BIO Convention

Yesterday I had the honor of spending 30 minutes interviewing Francis Gurry, the Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The interview was conducted on the record and at the BIO International Convention being held in Chicago, this week. My interview with the Director General took place at 11:00am, prior to his panel session with USPTO Director David Kappos at 2:00pm.

The Director General spoke substantively about issues facing the Patent Offices of the world, as well as some possible solutions. Gurry also discusses harmonization attempts, work-sharing agreements and the crushing worldwide backlog of patent applications that could lead to irrelevance of the system. As you read the interview you will also see that he thinks it is possible that the rest of the world will adopt a US-like grace period, which echos Kappos’ recent push to not only get US patent reform enacted but to harmonize laws, but to push the rest of the world toward a uniform grace period. Gurry also indulged me in a bit of speculation regarding software and the worldwide disagreement on whether software should be considered patentable subject matter.

Gurry was quite engaged and gracious. He is extraordinarily well informed and conversant with the issues and processes on both a macro and micro level, as well as the political realities associated with harmonization and other issues that have for decades dogged the international intellectual property community. We could have easily talked for hours on all sorts of issues, and I hope to have the opportunity to go back on the record with him in the future.

One of the main criticisms of patents by those who are not intimately familiar with patent law, or on the periphery of the industry, is that patents last too long.  The reality, if any generalizations could be made at all, is that the overwhelming majority of patents do not last “too long,” but if anything last for only a fleeting moment in the greater scheme of life. So while it is completely true to say that software and certain other high tech innovations should not be locked up for 20 years, the reality is that no patent provides 20 years of protection.  As a general rule the patent term can extend all the way to 20 years after the filing of a patent application, but you obtain no exclusive rights until a patent is issued, which is usually a minimum of several years after filing, sometimes much longer, as in the case of the recently issued TiVo patent that was issued more than 10 years after it was filed.  On top of that, to keep a patent in force you need to make additional payments over the course of the life of the patent, which is frequently not done.