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A U.S. Senator is seeking to close the patent loophole used by the pharmaceutical company Allergan:
Allergan's move to stop its patents from being reviewed by handing them off to a Native American tribe is winning support from few people outside the drug company. Now one lawmaker is seeking to ban it.
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) has introduced a bill (PDF) that would head off Allergan's strategy without waiting to see whether the judges at the Patent Trial and Appeals Board will even approve it. "This is one of the most brazen and absurd loopholes I've ever seen, and it should be illegal," McCaskill said last week in a statement to a pharmaceutical lobby group.
The Native American patent shelter, promoted by Allergan's outside law firm, seeks to avoid the process of "inter partes review," or IPR, for the patents protecting the blockbuster drug Restasis. The IPR process is a kind of quasi-litigation that takes place at the Patent Trial and Appeals Board for the sole purpose of determining whether a patent is valid or not. Now that the Restasis patents are owned by the St. Regis Mohawk tribe and licensed back to Allergan, the drug company's lawyers have asked for an impending IPR to be dismissed. The tribe argues that it's protected from IPRs by "sovereign immunity."
Previously: Allergan Pulls a Fast One
Congress Will Investigate Drug Company That Gave Its Patents to Mohawk Tribe
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @12:16AM
Not to be a cynic, but why is this news? Introducing bills is fairly easy, and is a FAR cry from becoming law. Members of Congress do it all the time for political posturing, especially when they have no chance of passing.
Case-in-point, the 80 (?) bills the Republicans introduced to kill the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") back when they were in the minority, and when they did not control both the house and the Senate.
It was introduced by a (D-Mo.), which means it has about as much chance of passing the Republican controlled Congress as there is of Donald Trump releasing his tax records.
If this bill were to get a Republican co-sponsor, it could theoretically be news-worthy. If it were to get out of committee, then it would have a fighting chance of being passed and would be much more news-worthy (assuming people found the substance to be interesting enough to report upon). However, as it stands right now, this is about as note-worthy as Rand Paul introducing a piece of legislation suggesting that America should abolish the Federal Reserve and go to the Gold Standard... maybe even less so.