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Supreme Court of Canada Voids Viagra Patent for Insufficient Disclosure
- ars 14y agoNow the most important question here is how will this effect spam levels. Will they go up due to cheap viagra in canada hawked in the US? Or will they go down since anyone who wants cheap viagra can get it from Canada? If the US does not issue a similar ruling, one thing you can expect is histrionics about banning drugs from Canada, even more than there already is.
- rpledge 14y agoWith generic drugs coming on the market, Pfizer will certainly soon face some stiff competition.
- neilk 14y agoTake pun threads to Reddit, please. http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/12wy98/viagra_patent_tossed_out_by_supreme_court_canadas/ http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/12wy98/viagra_pat...
- jgw 14y agoThey must be disappointed that their patent just didn't stand up.
- tehayj 14y agoIt was quite obvious they couldn't keep it up for any longer. The harder the competition, the better the fight.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- aroberge 14y agoThe Supreme Court of Canada is extremely well respected by a majority of Canadians and this ruling is a very good example of the reason why it is so well respected.
- waterside81 14y agoFellow Canadian here - indeed. You'd be hard pressed to guess which way a particular Justice leans politically, unlike our cousins to the south. Heck, our Chief Justice excused herself from Conrad Black's potential hearing because she didn't want to be in a conflict of interest. That's integrity right there. http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1285112--chief-justice-withdraws-from-deliberations-on-conrad-black-s-order-of-canada http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1285112-...
- jpzeni 14y agoWe just lean differently up here - federalist instead of sovereigntist. Take a look at this political cartoon that was in Le Devoir during the reference re secession of Quebec - http://jpzeni.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=64 http://jpzeni.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=64
- graeham 14y agoWorth mentioning the patent was set to expire in Canada in ~18 months anyways. The US patent was set to expire in early 2012 but coverage appears to have been extended to 2019. The bigger resulting effect here might be from the establishment of a precedent of the wording that the court is expecting in patent filings. In the full ruling below, the main missing disclosure I can see is: "Only sildenafil, the subject of Claim 7 and the active compound in Viagra, had been shown to be effective in treating ED at the time of the patent application. Although the patent includes the statement that “one of the especially preferred compounds induces penile erection in impotent males”, the patent application does not disclose that the compound that works is sildenafil, that it is found in Claim 7, or that the remaining compounds had not been found to be effective in treating ED." The full ruling is here http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2012/2012scc60/2012scc60.html http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2012/2012scc60/2012scc60...
- PotatoEngineer 14y agoOuch, that's nasty. A patent claim that lists a bunch of compounds, of which only one works? No wonder the court struck it down; the filing itself is actively obstructing knowledge.
- Osiris 14y agoThe problem I have with software patents is that they basically do the same thing. They request monopoly power over the invention while not disclosing how someone in the field could implement it, which would require source code, etc. Since software patents don't disclose enough for another programmer to implement the invention, I don't see how they are benefiting society. They don't share the knowledge but still get the monopoly benefit.
- Tipzntrix 14y agoPersonally I think a lot of software patents explain well enough that I could implement their "invention". It's just that the invention is so simple/obvious to us that I wonder how they got a patent and no prior art was found.
- Nogwater 14y agoLack of prior art should be used to establish novelty, not obviousness. The test for obviousness should be based on the proposed solution, not the problem.
- Sniffnoy 14y agoAgreed. I'd also like to note that the quid-pro-quo model of patents suggests that, in fact, it shouldn't be enough for the solution to be non-obvious: It should have to be non-obvious even once you have been told such a thing exists. Because if the mere knowledge of the existence of something would be sufficient to render how to do it obvious, the inventor cannot hope to keep its workings secret once it is released, and so we are trading for something that would be worthless anyway.
- throwy2 14y agothere's a logical flaw in your argument, though, because where you say "we are trading for something that would be worthless anyway" it assumes the choice is between "trade secret" and "disclosed." But there is really also a choice between "trade secret, people know it exists and what it does but must guess at how" and "trade secret, no one knows it exists or what it does". In other words, for some kinds of trade secrets, perhaps inventors might not even let you know of the existence of their invention, since without legal protection this knowledge would render the competitive advantage it confers worthless - even though before disclosure, skilled practitioners did not think to use it, as it is quite novel and those skilled in the art have not come up with it despite its obvious utility once disclosed. Thus inventors might secretly enjoy its benefits or fruits. (This is easy enough to imagine; there could be a closely guarded manufacturing process in use right now that the public and other manufactuers do not even knows exists, and is not in the final product. The manufacturer simply makes an end product more cheaply, say. But telling us what the process is would give it away.) Imagine, for example, that Google uses some kind of trade secret as part of ranking web pages. We don't even know what the process is, let alone how it is done. Naming the process would render it public and unprotected. So, it remains the only search engine that uses it, secretly.
- heliosvc 14y agoPatent laws generally could certainly be improved. But by far the biggest problem is software patents. There's no need to make all patents (software, hardware, pharma, etc.) the same because the industries and the cost structures / innovation cycles are very different.
- protomyth 14y agoI do wonder if this will have an effect on investment and research into medicines. If the cost of creating drugs (used to work in clinical trials) becomes greater than the return, I can see some problems.
- namank 14y agoHahahaha...this is why I love the Canadian legal system! Courts here go back to the founding principle behind a law and not just conclusion resulting from rules of the game. Go Canada.