Members of Congress want answers about a multinational drug company's deal to save its patents by handing them off to a Native American tribe.
Last month, Allergan gave the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe six patents that protect Restasis, the company's blockbuster eye drug. The goal is a sophisticated legal strategy to avoid having the US Patent Office proceed with a process called inter partes review, which is a kind of quasi-litigation in which opponents of a patent can try to have them revoked. Lawyers for Allergan are hoping that the principle of sovereign immunity, in which Native American tribes are treated as sovereign nations in certain ways, will protect their patents from government review.
The strategy may well succeed. IPR proceedings against patents held by public universities have been canceled on at least two occasions, when the Patent Trial and Appeals Board held that the universities benefit from sovereign immunity because they are state actors. The St. Regis Mohawk tribe will be paid an annual royalty of $15 million as long as the patents are valid.
The move is a legal maneuver to avoid challenges to their patent.
takyon: Allergan.
Previously: Allergan Pulls a Fast One
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 05 2017, @05:54PM (2 children)
In order to use the courts, you have to submit to the courts.
If the tribe wants to use the courts to defend their patents, they should have to submit to the courts for a patent review.
They need to pick a plan.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 05 2017, @06:53PM (1 child)
They can have it both ways. As TheLink observed upthread, corporations nearly always do.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @10:17AM
Corporations are the best known example of quantum superposition observable at macro scale.