Author: James Love

On October 26, 2011, a bipartisan group of members of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced HR 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act, known as SOPA. While much of the bill deals with “online” piracy,” some sections of the bill appear to have nothing to do with the Internet. The bill also creates a new bureaucracy to deal with very broadly defined trade related intellectual property rights issues, including those identified in the annual USTR Special 301 report.

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2010

April 29, 2010.
Brand name: Provenge
Generic name: Sipuleucel-T
Marketed by: Dendreon
Indication: therapy for certain men with advanced prostate cancer that uses their own immune system to fight the disease.
FDA press release here.
US Price: $31,000 per infusion. A full course of treatment is three infusions over a one-month period, or $93k.
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This note begins by looking at patents issued by the USPTO that specifically mention the term ritonavir in the patent claims, or mention the NIH contract that was used to fund the early development of the product. This includes 194 patents that cite ritonavir in the patent claims, and another 42 patents that cite the NIH contact that funded the early ritonavir work. We also provide quotes from an August 19, 2011 WIPO report on the patent landscape for ritonavir that found 805 patent families related to ritonavir.

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To better understand the benefits of the Gilead/MPP licenses, I have made some calculations of the persons living with HIV that are covered in the geographic areas of the various Gilead/MPP licenses.

• TDF/FTC territories
• COBI territories
• EVG-Quad territories

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The following excerpts are from an exchange of messages on ip-health about a recent recent petition regarding the patent pool that has been posted to several public health email lists. Among the leaders in the petition are apparently ITPC and the New York based I-MAK. ITPC has a long history of advocating for the interests of persons living with HIV, and I-MAK has for many years sought to overcome patent barriers for access to medicines. A copy of the petition is here http://www.petitionbuzz.com/petitions/mppunitaid.

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Today USTR was pointing to four documents to explain the U.S. decision to sign the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. While it was not surprising that the United States signed the agreement, KEI was disappointed that the statements did not address the issue of the inconsistencies between US law and the ACTA, or make any commitments that the ACTA Committee would operate in an open, transparent and inclusive manner.

These are the USTR documents:

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These were copied from David Hammerstein’s twitter feed, October 3, 2010.

http://twitter.com/#!/dahammerstein

• Treaty Visually Impaired before European Parliament at aprox. 15:30. Webstream: bit.ly/kQgrDf info: bit.ly/oDLbL0
• This is the correct link for the webstreaming of Treaty of visually impaired before the European Parliament: bit.ly/PwS9T
• Session begins in EP´s Petition Committee on Treaty for Visually Impaired. Chris Friend, World Blind Union condemns us to “book famine”

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Two areas where ACTA is inconsistent with US law, injunctions and damages
KEI Policy Brief, 2011:2
30 September 2011, revised 3 October 2011
James Love and Krista Cox

As the U.S. is reportedly about to sign ACTA, we wanted to point out two important areas where ACTA is not consistent with U.S. law. These are the sections of ACTA dealing with injunctions and damages. Below we have included the text from ACTA and the WTO TRIPS agreement on these two topics.

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This was read today, September 30, 2011, at the WIPO GA

Agenda Item 33 (iii), the Advisory Committee on Enforcement

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This was read today, September 30, 2011, at the WIPO GA

Agenda Item 33(i) Standing Committee on the Law of Patents

KEI agrees with the perceptive and constructive comments offered by South Africa on behalf of the Africa Group, and India, on behalf of the Development Agenda Group (DAG).

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