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takyon writes:

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

Original Submission

1. "takyon" - https://soylentnews.org/~takyon/
2. "close the patent loophole" - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/new-bill-would-end-native-american-sovereign-immunity-for-patents/
3. "bill (PDF)" - https://patentlyo.com/media/2017/10/TribalImmunity.pdf
4. "said last week" - https://www.mccaskill.senate.gov/media-center/news-releases/mccaskill-to-phrma-are-you-comfortable-with-allergans-action-with-saint-regis-mohawk-tribe
5. "Allergan Pulls a Fast One" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/09/11/1648250
6. "Congress Will Investigate Drug Company That Gave Its Patents to Mohawk Tribe" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/10/05/130240
7. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=22683

printed from SoylentNews, Bill Introduced to Close Allergan's Native American "Sovereign Immunity" Patent Loophole on 2024-04-20 04:19:01