Passionate about IP! Since June 2003 the IPKat has covered copyright, patent, trade mark, designs, info-tech and confidentiality issues from a mainly UK and European perspective. Read, post comments and participate!

The team is Eleonora Rosati, Annsley Merelle Ward and Merpel. E-mail the Kats here!

The team is joined by GuestKats Kevin Bercimuelle-Chamot, Jocelyn Bosse, Alessandro Cerri, Anastasiia Kyrylenko, Marcel Pemsel and Anna Maria Stein.

SpecialKats: Verónica Rodríguez Arguijo (TechieKat), Antonios Baris (Book Review Editor), Rose Hughes (PatKat) and Chijioke Okorie (Africa Correspondent).

InternKats: Asude Sena Moya and Söğüt Atilla.
Home / / COMMISSION FINDS PATENT ABUSE FALLS WITHIN ART.82

COMMISSION FINDS PATENT ABUSE FALLS WITHIN ART.82


The European Commission has found AstraZeneca guilty of abusing its dominant position on the market for proton pump inhibitors by misusing the patent system. AZ provided false information to the patent offices of a number of EU Member States which led to AZ gaining extended patent protection for Losec through supplementary protection certificates. The presence of the SPCs meant that the patent offices did not examine whether Losce was innovative, as they would normally be obliged to do in a patent claim. Once AZ had this extended patent protection, it used it anticompetitively in order to blocking or delay market access for generic versions of Losec. AZ also used its dominant position in order to prevent parallel importers from importing the drug.

The IPKat thinks that the relationship between antitrust and IP is poorly understood. He waits to see what IP lawyers will make of this decision.

Proton pump inhibitors here
COMMISSION FINDS PATENT ABUSE FALLS WITHIN ART.82 COMMISSION FINDS PATENT ABUSE FALLS WITHIN ART.82 Reviewed by Anonymous on Friday, June 17, 2005 Rating: 5

3 comments:

  1. AnonymousMonday, 20 June 2005 at 11:12:00 GMT+1

    I don't think this is quite correct. What AZ were found to have done was to make a false claim to the first date of marketing of Losec, in order to obtain SPCs. The actual first date of marketing was earlier and would have meant that SPCs were not available. SPCs are of course not subject to examination for novelty and inventive step, since the corresponding patent was already examined. However, an SPC can be challenged on the grounds that the corresponding patent should not have been granted.
    I agree that it seems a bit odd to use competition law to punish this behaviour, but what other sanction could there be?

    Darren Smyth

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousMonday, 20 June 2005 at 16:20:00 GMT+1

    Thanks Darren. The error could have been mine, but I thought I stuck pretty closely to the Commission's Press Release on the subject.

    I don't know if I'd say that it's "odd" to use competition law - merely that IP lawyers don't understand it properly, and that this is unfortunate.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousTuesday, 21 June 2005 at 10:52:00 GMT+1

    The Commission's press release is misleading and incomplete. The more useful source of information is the press release giving the preliminary findings in 2003:

    http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/03/1136&format=HTML&aged=1&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

    ReplyDelete

All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.

It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.

Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html

Subscribe to: Post Comments ( Atom )
Powered by Blogger.